Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — EMPLOYMENT

Pottery Industry, North Staffordshire

Mrs. Slater: asked the Minister of Labour how many men and women are unemployed or on short working time in the pottery industry in north Staffordshire.

The Minister of Labour and National Service (Mr. Iain Macleod): At 14th January, 505 males and 407 females were registered as wholly unemployed and 1,189 males and 2,377 females temporarily stopped. Statistics of the number on short time at the beginning of January in the Midland region, the great majority of whom were in north Staffordshire, will be available shortly, and I will let the hon. Member have them when they are ready.

Mrs. Slater: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that an increasing number of people in north Staffordshire are becoming unemployed, and that there are also an increasing number on short-time working, which figure is going up week by week? Is he also aware that one of the problems of short-time working is that large numbers of women do not benefit from unemployment insurance, and, with the rising cost of living, this is becoming a very severe problem? Would he not approach his right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer about reconsideration of a reduction in Purchase Tax?

Mr. Macleod: I think I would agree with most of the hon. Lady's analysis, particularly with the suggestion that some of the difficulties of this industry have been—not perhaps created, but at all events accentuated—since the increase in the Purchase Tax. I will certainly discuss that with my right hon. Friend.

Tuberculous Persons

Mrs. Slater: asked the Minister of Labour what advice or help is given to encourage employment of people suffering from tuberculosis.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour and National Service (Mr. Robert Carr): My officers do all they can, in co-operation with chest physicians, to help the tuberculous to obtain employment. For this purpose, all the services provided under the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act, including industrial rehabilitation and training, are available to the tuberculous as they are to other disabled people. Special facilities for training and employment under sheltered conditions are provided by Remploy, and by some voluntary bodies and local authorities.

Mrs. Slater: While thanking the hon. Gentleman for that reply, may I ask him if he is aware that it is important that these people should have employment, if it is possible? Would it be possible for the Minister to advise the local offices of the Ministry of Labour to have consultations with the employers and probably the trade unions to see how far sheltered occupations within industry might be found, in addition to the work of Remploy?

Mr. Carr: I will certainly do that, but I think that the hon. Lady should know that my officers have been doing a great work in this field for a number of years in breaking down some of the unnecessary prejudices and difficulties that did exist. We also published a special pamphlet on the subject last year.

Mr. Wilfred Paling: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that Government Departments do not make matters too easy for people who have had tuberculosis? Is he aware that, if a man applies for any unestablished post in a Department, he has to state specifically whether he has ever suffered from tuberculosis or not, and that, when most applicants read that, they are likely to jump to the conclusion that their case has been damned even before it is considered?

Mr. Carr: I will look into that. I do not think the right hon. Gentleman's conclusion is necessarily justified. It probably is right that employers should get this information. We must, of course,


while providing opportunities for the tuberculous, protect the health of other people as well.

Engineering Industry

Mr. Lewis: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware of the danger of industrial upheaval and trade disputes in the engineering industry; and what action he proposes to take to prevent industrial unrest in this industry.

Mr. Iain Macleod: I am informed that the unions concerned have requested a further meeting with the employers' federation to discuss their wages claim. No action at this stage is called for on my part.

Mr. Lewis: Is the Minister aware of the fact that engineering workers are under the impression that the Government have advised the engineering employers not to grant any wage increases? Can we have an assurance that no such advice has been or will be given by the right hon. Gentleman or by the Government?

Mr. Macleod: Yes. Sir, I can give an absolute assurance on that. It is no part of the Government's duty to advise an organisation of employers either to accept or to reject wage claims.

Mr. Lee: Now that there is an ex-president of the engineering employers' federation in the Cabinet, will the right hon. Gentleman consult him to make sure that the federation does not in future give a blank negative to a wage application before hearing what it is about?

Mr. Macleod: The hon. Member must realise that that supplementary question is at variance with the answer that I have just given. It is not the business of the Government to give the sort of advice that the hon. Member has suggested.

Fee-Charging Employment Agencies, Coventry

Miss Burton: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware of the disapproval of the Coventry District Committee of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions at the functioning of fee-charging employment agencies in the city at a time of serious redundancy: and what action he proposes to take following the further information supplied to him by the hon. Member for Coventry, South.

Mr. Iain Macleod: I have received no further information since I replied to the hon. Member on this subject on 22nd January.

Miss Burton: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the unions in Coventry are so disturbed at the position that at the February meeting of the Confederation a decision is to be taken whether or not to take militant action? Is he further aware that other employment agencies in the Midlands regard these fee-charging agencies as pirate agencies? If the L.C.C. has some power of control in this matter, is that not possible in Coventry?

Mr. Macleod: It is true that some local authorities, including London but not including Coventry, have local legislation on this matter. I dare say that question can be pursued separately. In relation to the major question, I have studied all the representations that have been made. I have nothing to add about the position on the question of legislation as it was outlined by the former Home Secretary just before Christmas.

Transfer of Labour

Miss Burton: asked the Minister of Labour what steps his Department has taken to make available systems for transfer of labour to other districts during the present period of redundancy and unemployment; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Under the normal working of the employment exchange service there is a regular system for the circulation of vacancies that cannot be filled locally and in selected cases where unemployed workers are prepared to consider transfer to another district particulars of their experience, etc., are sent for consideration by employers in other districts. At the latest available date the number of vacancies outside daily travelling distance notified to the Coventry Exchange was 2,486.

Miss Burton: Does the Minister not realise that, whatever his intentions might be, these Answers do not seem to be couched in urgent phrasing, as is necessary in reference to Coventry? Does he realise that as recently as 15th January the Chairman of the Midland Regional Board of Industry said that no remedial


measures for unemployment or redundancy had been discussed by the board? How much unemployment are we to have before such measures may be discussed?

Mr. Macleod: I understand the natural anxiety of the hon. Lady about the place which she has the honour to represent in this House. I have to consider not only Coventry but all other cities and boroughs in the country. The unemployment rate in Coventry, although giving rise to anxiety—and I am watching it with great care—and although the figures have climbed in the last month, is under 2 per cent. The special facilities have never been made available by previous Governments in respect of unemployment under a figure of about 5 per cent., but I am having a special inquiry made to see whether the rule should be relaxed. I can assure the hon. Lady that I am watching the position literally from day to day.

Refugees from Hungary and Egypt

Mr. Hector Hughes: asked the Minister of Labour if he will state his plans for providing work and accommodation for refugees from Hungary and Egypt to Great Britain.

Mr. Iain Macleod: The full facilities of the employment exchange service are being used to place refugees from Hungary and Egypt in employment and special interviewing arrangements have been made and exchange managers are making special approaches, where necessary, to employers in many parts of the country. My officers co-operate closely with the Departments and organisations concerned with the important problem of accommodation.

Mr. Hughes: Does the Minister realise that many of these refugees are British nationals expelled from Egypt in circumstances which have put them in dire need? What is he doing in particular for such people?

Mr. Macleod: Of course I recognise that, and it is a matter of great concern to the Government. I think there is a Question to be asked of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on the general subject. I would not want to anticipate any statement which he may be able to make. I should like to assure the hon. and learned Member, the House and the

country that there is no subject about which we are more anxious at present than to see that full justice is done to all these people who have been driven out of Egypt.

Mr. Ede: Could the right hon. Gentleman say what proportion of the refugees from Hungary belong to the professional classes and what proportion to the artisan classes?

Mr. Macleod: I could not do so exactly without notice. One of the main difficulties between these great groups of refugees—the Hungarians on one side and those from Egypt on the other—is that on the whole the Hungarians are young, single and often skilled men who are comparatively easy to place in employment, whereas those coming from Egypt, many of Maltese origin, present a much more difficult problem because they have families and dependants, and some of their qualifications are not readily assimilated into industry in this country.

Mr. Pentland: asked the Minister of Labour how many Hungarian refugees now staying at Plausworth, Durham, have been found employment.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Three Hungarian refugees at Plausworth Hostel have been placed in employment and a further 51 are being submitted for jobs.

Older Workers

Mr. E. Johnson: asked the Minister of Labour when the Committee appointed to study the problems arising in connection with the employment of older workers will publish its next Report; and if he will make a statement in regard to its present activities.

Mr. Carr: The National Advisory Committee has published two Reports which make recommendations for promoting the employment of older workers. The Ministry takes active steps to encourage their implementation and there is evidence of a greater willingness by employers to consider older workers on their merits without regard to their age. A problem undoubtedly remains, but no useful purpose would be served in issuing yet a further report for the time being. For the present the Committee's efforts are concentrated on encouraging


research into specific problems associated with the employment of older workers.

Mr. Lee: Could the right hon. Gentleman say whether any progress has been made with the very delicate problem—as realised by the Committee in its Report —of the transfer of superannuation or pension rights as between one employer and another which, as the Committee recognised, is one of the big problems connected with this issue?

Mr. Carr: I recognise that, but I should be glad, if the hon. Member has information on the subject, if he would put down a Question on it.

Newcastle-under-Lyme

Mr. Swingler: asked the Minister of Labour the number of workers registered as wholly unemployed in the Borough and Rural District of Newcastle-under-Lyme at the latest date for which figures are available; and how this compares with the figures for one year and two years ago, respectively.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Unemployed persons resident in the Borough and Rural District of Newcastle-under-Lyme register at the Newcastle-under-Lyme Employment Exchange and Youth Employment Office. The number registered as wholly unemployed at those offices at 14th January was 792, compared with 353 at 16th January, 1956, and 358 at 10th January, 1955.

Mr. Swingler: Does that not indicate a serious increase in unemployment in that part of north Staffordshire? Is the Minister aware that the combination of Purchase Tax on pottery, the credit squeeze and redundancy is producing very serious effects in north Staffordshire? While noting with pleasure the Answer given to my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Mrs. Slater), may I ask whether the Minister will draw the attention of all his colleagues to these difficulties, which show the consequences of some of their policies?

Mr. Macleod: I will do that. The Question asked by the hon. Member was, of course, linked to the earlier Question asked by his hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Mrs. Slater). I do not think we should ignore the effect

on export markets which foreign competition is having in this industry, but I entirely agree that some of the difficulty which the industry is experiencing at present is due to Purchase Tax.

Mr. Nabarro: Will my right hon. Friend make clear that he is not this afternoon advocating a policy of unilateral Purchase Tax relief in favour of one particular class of consumer goods? Will he bear in mind that the symptoms described in relation to the pottery industry are still manifest in the carpet industry?

Mr. Macleod: I am putting forward no undertaking of any sort in relation to Purchase Tax. All I am doing is recognising a simple fact in relation to this industry—that its difficulties have very much increased and that that is due in large measure to Purchase Tax.

Mr. Swingler: asked the Minister of Labour the number of registered disabled persons unemployed in the Borough and Rural District of Newcastle-under-Lyme at the latest date for which figures are available; and how this compares with the figures one year and two years ago, respectively.

Mr. Carr: Two hundred and twenty-four at 21st January, 1957, compared with 123 twelve months ago and 120 two years ago.

Mr. Swingler: Is the hon. Gentleman aware from those figures that there is a need for more work for disabled persons in north Staffordshire? Is he aware that this position is now affected by the serious cut in petrol consumption which appears to have been imposed on Remploy and is preventing the expansion of Remploy? Will he investigate that aspect of the matter, and also do everything possible to get an expansion of work for disabled persons?

Mr. Carr: I will certainly look into the particular matter raised by the hon. Member. I do not want to underestimate what is happening, but I wish to draw the attention of the House to the fact that the proportion of increase in disabled unemployment is less than that in able-bodied unemployment. I think we can draw some comfort from the responsibility shown by employers. This is an important point and shows that what


we feared is not happening, namely, that employers are not putting off disabled people in order to employ others. We shall watch the position carefully.

Aircraft Industry

Mr. Fenner Brockway: asked the Minister of Labour how many workers employed at the Hawker Aircraft Company's factory at Langley are estimated to become redundant in consequence of the cancellation of the Ministry of Supply order for 100 Hunter jet fighters; and what steps are being taken to ensure alternative employment.

Mr. Hunter: asked the Minister of Labour how many employees at Hawker's aircraft factory at Kingston-on-Thames are estimated to be about to become redundant in consequence of cancellation of Ministry of Supply orders; and what steps are being taken to ensure alternative employment.

Mr. Lee: asked the Minister of Labour the number of workers dismissed from or working part-time in the aircraft industry at the latest convenient date; and what effects on employment he estimates will follow the decision to cut production of the Hunter aircraft.

Mr. Skeffington: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware that employees at Hawker Aircraft Factory. Kingston-on-Thames, are to become redundant; and what steps are being taken to deal with this matter.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Some 1,200 workers in the aircraft industry were reported to be on short time last week. No large redundancies have been reported in recent months and the numbers unemployed on 10th December were 804 or 0·3 per cent. of the industry's labour force.
I am in touch with the Hawker Aircraft Company, but it cannot yet say how many workers may be discharged in consequence of the cut in Hunter aircraft production. My local officers will give discharged workers every possible help in finding other employment.

Mr. Brockway: Does not the right hon. Gentleman regard that as a somewhat complacent reply? Is he aware that locally it is stated that between 700 and 800 employees of the Hawker Aircraft Company will lose their work in October?
Is he aware that this is a magnificent factory which could make not only aeroplanes but almost anything? Does he contemplate, without trying to find some alternative employment, that it should just become a storehouse, with the consequent loss of technical experts?

Mr. Macleod: I am bound to say that it seems difficult to read the hon. Member's supplementary question into the Answer which I gave the House. I am in touch with the Hawker Aircraft Company. I believe that the general manager is to issue some form of a statement to the employees and to the Press today. As for the possibilities of future employment, this company has, in the main, four factories. Three of them are in or near the Greater London area and, as the hon. Member knows very well, there is no great employment problem in that area. The other factory is in Lancashire, and that is a much more difficult problem.

Mr. Hunter: Will the Minister consult the Minister of Supply with a view to finding alternative contracts for the Hawker Aircraft Company? I assure the Minister that there is great concern amongst employees of the company, who are threatened with redundancy to the number of many hundreds. Will he watch the position very carefully?

Mr. Macleod: I recognise that there is anxiety, and I shall be very glad to consult my right hon. Friend.

Air Commodore Harvey: Will not my right hon. Friend agree that in this case considerable notice has been given of the cuts but that the real danger is that further cuts may take place in the industry? Will he consult his right hon. Friend to see that adequate notice is given in order to enable the works to reorganise and turn to other types of manufacture, if necessary?

Mr. Macleod: I will do everything I can to help in any long-term planning or redeployment which may be necessary, and I am sure that in their turn the company, and indeed all other companies, will recognise that they can help me a great deal by giving the maximum amount of notice.

Mr. Lee: Is the Minister aware that this is the type of thing to which I was trying to get the Prime Minister to reply


a day or two ago when he made his statement on defence—that wherever this kind of running down of armaments orders takes place, there must be a compensating increase in other industrial activity? While I appreciate that this is outside the purview of the right hon. Gentleman's Department, will he, from the Cabinet angle, please try to expand the industrial base in that manner?

Mr. Dudley Williams: Will my right hon. Friend once more repeat, in order that it may be understood by right hon. and hon. Members opposite, that there is no shortage of vacancies in this area and no difficulty whatever in absorbing these men into the activities of other industries? Is it not altogether a strange Question to be put down by the hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway), who is well known for his pacifist activities?

Mr. Macleod: I think it is true that for workers in three out of the four factories there were, at any rate on the December figures, many more vacancies in the area than unemployed, but it is also true—which I must recognise—that the position has deteriorated to some extent in the last few weeks; and although I recognise the general truth of what my hon. Friend has said, it is a position which I must watch.

Disabled Persons (Rehabilitation)

Mr. Simmons: asked the Minister of Labour if he is yet in a position to state his intentions in respect of the implementation of the recommendations of the Committee of Inquiry on the Rehabilitation of Disabled Persons.

Mr. Carr: I am not yet able to make a statement, but consideration of the Committee's recommendations is going on steadily.

Mr. Simmons: Is it not a fact that of the 46 recommendations half concern the Ministry of Labour? There were the results of nearly four years' hard work in this Report. Will the Minister make representations that the House should be given an opportunity of discussing the Report? It seems a pity that four years' hard work is being brushed off with a Question and Answer.

Mr. Carr: I can assure the hon. Member that it is certainly not being brushed off, but the fact that there are four years'

hard work in the Report means that there is a lot to consider. The consideration is going on urgently. The National Advisory Council on this subject met on 13th December. It referred specific recommendations to specialist committees and is meeting again in March to consider the comments of those committees.

Scotland

Mr. Hector Hughes: asked the Minister of Labour if he is aware that owing to the long hauls necessary in the north and north-east of Scotland the shortage of petrol has a prejudicial effect on industry and therefore on employment there; the numbers unemployed and on short-time working in each industry in Scotland as a result of the present petrol shortage; and what steps he is taking to prevent the frustration and to minimise unemployment in the north and northeast of Scotland.

Mr. Iain Macleod: I am aware that in remote areas, such as the north and north-east of Scotland, there are special difficulties as a result of the restrictions on petrol supplies. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation takes these into account in allocating supplementary allowances of petrol. My own officers are also keeping a close watch on the situation in these areas in order that the effect on employment may be minimised.
Last week some 1,700 workers in various industries in Scotland were reported to be working short time either wholly or partly because of the petrol shortage. Since 7th November, 1956, the discharge of 1,100 workers has been reported. Some of these have since found other employment.

Mr. Hughes: Do not the figures show that this is a very grave and urgent matter in which the Minister should act in collaboration not only with his right hon. Friend whom he mentioned but also with Lord Mills, Minister of Power? One way in which this operates to frustrate industry is by diminishing the journeys of Scottish commercial travellers, which is a very serious matter. Will the right hon. Gentleman attend to it?

Mr. Macleod: I think that complaints, particularly from the north of Scotland,


about the petrol allocation, are to some extent being met, and I believe that the position is becoming rather more satisfactory. I should not have thought that the figures which I gave were quite as alarming as the hon. and learned Member suggested in his supplementary question, but it is of course true that Scotland is, and has been for many years, a special problem in this respect.

Mr. John MacLeod: Would my right hon. Friend point out to the Minister responsible that there are many small firms, such as joiners whose business is carried on in remote areas and where people have to travel long distances? Although the figures may be small, because not many people are employed in those industries, this matter is most important for those small firms.

Mr. Macleod: I think that that is perfectly true, and it is those matters which I hope and believe are being taken carefully into account in the supplementary allocations.

Mr. Lawson: asked the Minister of Labour over what periods during the past live years the number of registered unemployed in Scotland has exceeded the number of notified unfilled vacancies.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Throughout the period 1952–56—indeed, since these records started in 1945—the number of registered unemployed in Scotland has exceeded the number of notified unfilled vacancies.

Mr. Lawson: Is the Minister aware that this position has prevailed in Scotland, despite the fact that every year we lose thousands of our workpeople? Is he further aware that in the December figures there were three unemployed persons for every unfilled vacancy? Will the right hon. Gentleman approach the President of the Board of Trade to see whether something can be done about resuming the building of factories in Scotland, in order that we may get a fair share of industrial development?

Mr. Macleod: I am always closely in touch with my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade on that matter. For some years now the relative position of Scotland has improved in that respect, and that is also true in relation

to the ratio of vacancies to unemployed. It is true again that the deterioration in employment that took place generally over the country during the last year has not happened in Scotland. There are a number of helpful signs, although I recognise that it is essentially a long-term problem for us to solve.

Factories, Feltham and Hayes

Mr. Hunter: asked the Minister of Labour how many employees at E.M.I. factories at Feltham and Hayes are estimated shortly to become redundant; and what steps are being taken to find them alternative employment.

Mr. Skeffington: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware that a number of employees at Electrical and Musical Industries at Hayes are to become redundant; and what steps are being taken to deal with this matter.

Mr. Iain Macleod: So far as I am aware no major redundancy is impending at the factories in question.

Mr. Hunter: Will the Minister watch the position? A large number of my constituents are very nervous of the shadow of redundancy, and I should be obliged if he would watch the position. They are worried about the whole situation, for E.M.I. are very large employers in that area.

Mr. Macleod: Yes, they are. The position is, I think, that some contracts are ending, and as a result some discussions are going on with the unions and some reduction in the hours worked weekly has been agreed in order to avoid redundancy. If those methods do not work, I suppose it is possible that there will be some redundancy, but the present position is not unhopeful, although it is one which I must watch.

Skilled Labour, Tees-side

Mr. Marquand: asked the Minister of Labour the total of vacancies for skilled labour in the steel, chemical, engineering, shipbuilding, and clothing industries notified to the employment exchanges on Tees-side; and whether he will circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT the numbers of vacancies in each of these industries separately.

Mr. Iain Macleod: The available statistics relate to all grades of labour in each industry, and separate figures for skilled labour are not compiled. The total number of vacancies in the steel, chemical, engineering, shipbuilding and clothing industries notified to employment exchanges on Tees-side and remaining unfilled at 9th January, 1957, was 848. I am circulating a detailed table in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Mr. Marquand: Although the right hon. Gentleman's quotable figures do not include specific details about skilled labour, may I ask whether he is aware that there is a great shortage of skilled labour in these industries at a time when there is unemployment among similar types of labour elsewhere in the country? Is he further aware that it is the shortage of housing, caused by the Government's slowing down of the housing programme, which is causing the difficulty, and is he in touch with his right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government about the problem?

Mr. Macleod: The hon. Member's supplementary question, of course, goes a long way. It is perfectly true that there is great pressure on skilled labour in that area, and that, indeed, is true—whatever pockets of difficulty there may be—of many other areas as well. I entirely agree that accommodation is one of the particular snags that one has to overcome in ensuring some reasonable amount of mobility of labour in the community. We do what we can and I have detailed, in response to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Belper (Mr. G. Brown), the particular measures available to ease that problem.

Following is the table:

NUMBERS OF VACANCIES IN THE UNDERMENTIONED INDUSTRIES NOTIFIED TO EMPLOYMENT EXCHANGES ON TEES-SIDE AND REMAINING UNFILLED AT 9TH JANUARY, 1957


Industry Group
Males
Females
Total


Steel melting, rolling, etc.
232
6
238


Chemicals and allied trades
401
15
416


Engineering
65
7
72


Shipbuilding and ship-repairing
67
6
73


Clothing
4
45
49

Industrial Health Services and Organisation

Mr. Willey: asked the Minister of Labour when he anticipates being able to make a statement on industrial health services and organisation as envisaged in paragraph 143 of the Report on the Staffing and Organisation of the Factory Inspectorate.

Mr. Iain Macleod: I am not able to say when I shall be in a position to make such a statement.

Mr. Willey: It is very heartening to read in the Report that much thinking is taking place about this matter, but is it unrealistic to expect effective action in the near future as a result of that thinking?

Mr. Macleod: The main thinking referred to in paragraph 143 of the Report, which the hon. Gentleman quotes, is that being done by the Industrial Health Advisory Committee. I should not like to hurry that. I think that it is more important that we get the right answer than that we come to a conclusion quickly. In particular, I am sure that we want the result of the very important survey going on in Stoke-on-Trent into the pottery industry, which will not be available until the end of the year.

Dr. Stross: Is the Minister aware that the investigation to which he has just referred as taking place in north Staffordshire into the pottery industry is going very well, but that if it were hurried too much and not completed properly we should lose all the best benefits that we expect from it?

Departmental Medical Inspectorate

Mr. Willey: asked the Minister of Labour the present strength and grades of the Medical Inspectorate of his Department: and to what extent he is proposing to increase the numbers in any grade during 1957.

Mr. Iain Macleod: There are at present on the strength of the Medical Inspectorate, one senior medical inspector, three deputy senior medical inspectors and 11 medical inspectors. I hope to increase the strength by three medical inspectors during 1957 to fill existing vacancies.

Mr. Willey: Whilst I appreciate that the increase this year is encouraging,


would not the Minister recognise that this service appears to be inadequate, and that that is another reason for our hoping to get a reply earlier than he has indicated in his reply to a previous Question?

Mr. Macleod: The hon. Member knows that this and his previous Question are very closely linked. The reason why, in part at any rate, no suggestions have been made for increases in the cadre is that it was thought that those changes should await the decisions on policy to which I referred in my earlier Answer.

Mr. Skeffington: asked the Minister of Labour when it is proposed to announce the successor to the senior medical inspector of his Department who is to retire this year.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Her Majesty's Senior Medical Inspector of Factories will retire at the end of August next. I hope to be able to announce his successor well before August.

Mr. Skeffington: Does the right hon. Gentleman realise that many people on both sides of industry regard the work of this inspectorate as of very great importance, and want to see it extended, as the Minister has indicated in reply to an earlier Question? Therefore, in building up an effective department, the name of the gentleman who is to be in charge should be known soon.

Mr. Macleod: I recognise that, and I attach the greatest importance to the Medical Inspectorate, as does the hon. Gentleman.

Coventry

Miss Burton: asked the Minister of Labour the unemployment figures in Coventry up to the latest convenient date in January; and what proportion this bears to the figure for December.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Three thousand and sixty-six, at 14th January, compared with 2,228 at 10th December.

Miss Burton: Is the Minister aware that my figures from the unions on 17th January were, I am very sorry to say, even worse than his? Would he not feel able to come to Coventry himself to look into these matters? For example, is he aware that many of these recent dismissals are among men with thirty and forty years' service, and that the National

Union of Vehicle Builders is very worried about the chances of any of these men who are over 60 years of age getting jobs again? We should like him to come—would he consider it?

Mr. Macleod: I will certainly consider it. If there is any discrepancy in the figures, it is likely that those compiled through the employment exchanges are accurate; but I do not think that there is much dispute between us as to the figures. I think that it is most important to remember in this, as in all other questions, that we are approaching—indeed, we are now just about at—the seasonal peak of unemployment. In every year since the war there has been an average increase of about 45,000 to 50,000—that sort of figure—in these two months. I have said, and I repeat it, that the petrol and oil restrictions, and other complications, will this year add slightly, or, perhaps, considerably to these figures, but when we look at the figures of unemployment we should bear in mind the normal position every year in these months.

Mr. Lee: Do I take it from that Answer that the Minister envisages a decline from now on in the figures of unemployment and part-time working? If not, to what extent does he believe the oil position will alter the usual pattern?

Mr. Macleod: No, I cannot prophesy that. In some years the February figure is rather higher than January and, in others, rather lower. It depends, for example, on the sort of weather we are going to get, and, obviously, I cannot prophesy that. The weather has a considerable effect on the building trade. We have, in fact, been rather lucky so far as January is concerned. But the employment situation does depend also on the availability of fuel supplies to industry. The position has been announced as being safe until the end of February, and I think that in a day or two my noble Friend the Minister of Power will make a statement about March supplies.

Restrictive Practices

Mr. Lee: asked the Minister of Labour whether he will make a statement on the results of his inquiries into restrictive practices in industry.

Mr. Iain Macleod: The National Joint Advisory Council's study of this subject is by no means complete, but the results


so far reported offer encouraging evidence of the readiness of employers and workers in industry to tackle the problem jointly in a spirit of mutual co-operation.

Wages (Payment by Cheque)

Mr. Lee: asked the Minister of Labour if he will give an assurance that no Government legislation will be introduced to amend the Truck Acts to make possible the payment of wages by cheque.

Mr. Iain Macleod: As the hon. Member knows, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and I have given some attention to this matter. I have recently discussed it with the National Joint Advisory Council, and I am considering, with my colleagues, the views expressed by both sides of industry.

Mr. Lee: Would the Minister agree that, to introduce a system of this type without making any sort of arrangements as to how cheques could, in fact, be utilised by local grocers and the like—to say nothing about complications of a domestic nature which may well arise—would not be a good thing at this particular time; and would he bear in mind that a very large section of organised labour would not like to see such a development take place?

Mr. Macleod: With respect, I think that the hon. Gentleman is chasing the wrong hare, because ever since 1831 it has been possible under the Truck Acts, with the consent of the worker—which, of course, would always be preserved—to pay wages by cheque. It is only alterations in the banking structure that has made the Truck Acts inoperable. But of course I will take very carefully into account the views put to me, some very forcibly, by trade union representatives at my meeting.

Mr. Lee: Then may I ask the Minister whether he would now guarantee that before contemplating any such introduction he would make the most minute investigations in order to find out whether the workers in industry would welcome this arrangement or not?

Mr. Macleod: I certainly should not contemplate bringing in any Government legislation until the very fullest consultations had taken place.

Mr. Page: Can my right hon. Friend find any good cause why it should remain a crime, under a Statute a century and a quarter old, for employers and employees freely to agree amongst themselves for the payment of wages in any form?

Mr. Macleod: There is no doubt that if such a Clause had been introduced as, for example, my hon. Friend is contemplating in his Private Bill, it would have done little more, in fact nothing more, than restore the original position of the Truck Acts; but the point that was put to me with some force was, not that there was anything wrong in the system, but that it might lead to undesirable pressure upon workpeople being introduced. I am not saying whether that point of view is right or wrong, but it is one that I must take into account.

Household Expenditure Inquiry, 1953–54

Mr. Marquand: asked the Minister of Labour when he proposes to present to Parliament the full findings of the Household Expenditure Inquiry, 1953–54.

Mr. Carr: The Report is likely to be available by about the middle of this year.

Mr. Marquand: Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that his right hon. Friend said on 13th March last that he proposed to publish towards the end of the year the pattern of expenditure of the groups excluded from the cost-of-living survey? Is this not an unconscionable long time to take in publishing these facts? Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that everybody concerned with the welfare of 2 million and more people living on National Assistance want to have the facts? Are the Government delaying because they do not want the country to know what the facts are?

Mr. Carr: I can reassure the right hon. Gentleman on the last point in his supplementary question. It is true that we are falling behind our original hoped-for schedule, but we want to publish these results in detail. It is proving longer to tabulate the information than we had hoped would be the case. We are getting on with it.

Oral Answers to Questions — NATIONAL SERVICE

Deferment

Mr. Allaun: asked the Minister of Labour if he will permit deferment of National Service for those undergoing approved courses of study in commerce and retail distribution.

Mr. Iain Macleod: Deferment is already granted to apprentices in certain retail trades where recognised apprenticeship schemes exist, and I am always prepared to extend these arrangements if suitable schemes are submitted to me. The position as regards commerce is under consideration.

Mr. Allaun: While thanking the Minister for that reply, which indicates some progress, I should like to ask him whether he is aware that these young workers studying for their national certificates are the only ones at present refused deferment, that this is causing great difficulty to shipping, commercial and similar offices, and that these young men find it very hard to resume their studies after two years' National Service, and consequently many of them never do resume them?

Mr. Macleod: The hon. Member's Question refers to study. There is something of a difficulty here because deferment has been granted only so that a man can complete his training and not normally for whole-time courses of study, unless they are at a university, technical college or similar institution. There is a scheme for commercial apprenticeships, and although it has not yet been formally submitted to me, that will be done in the near future. The scheme is being informally studied in my Ministry at present.

Mr. Lipton: asked the Minister of Labour how many men were deferred from call-up for National Service on 1st October, 1955.

Mr. Iain Macleod: The number on 3rd October. 1955, was 437,110.

Mr. Lipton: Has the right hon. Gentleman taken note of the fact that the figure has gone up from 437,000 to 445,000 in twelve months, although he is not calling up the full number in the age groups? Is that not an indication that this National Service system, under which about 70 per cent. of the young

men concerned are not required, is just a lot of nonsense and ought to be dispensed with at the earliest possible moment?

Mr. Macleod: The hon. Gentleman really cannot build that castle on such a tiny amount of sand. There is only a 7,000 increase between the years. Unless one studies the number of young men who were born eighteen years ago in regard to each of these figures, no comparison is valid.

Mr. Lee: While appreciating the need for certain types of reservation, may I ask whether it is not undesirable that we should continually narrow the base from which we draw people who go into National Service?

Mr. Macleod: The whole future of National Service is a subject which the Government are considering and on which they will make their pronouncement in due course. As I told the hon. Gentleman a week ago, there are more young people coming into the net at the present time than are needed.

Mr. Gaitskell: Could the Minister help to clarify the position by saying what proportion the deferments are to the number called up?

Mr. Macleod: I think, speaking without the book and subject to correction, that about 300,000 are originally in an age class, that about 200,000 of those, because of medical or other reasons, are active candidates for National Service, and on the average 70,000 or 80,000 of those are deferred for any given reason.

Oral Answers to Questions — SCOTLAND

Scottish Office (Information Services)

Mr. G. M. Thomson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland to what extent responsibility for the information services of the Scottish Office is to be assumed by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. John Maclay): As indicated in the reply given to the hon. Member by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on 24th January, my responsibility for the information services of the Scottish Office is unaffected.

Mr. Thomson: Since the Prime Minister said that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is to be responsible for coordinating the various Departmental information services, can the Secretary of State say what that means? In what way will the Scottish information services be co-ordinated? In view of the obscurity of this statement, could he tell us what his right hon. Friend is doing about it?

Mr. Maclay: My own expectation is that I look forward to maintaining very close contact with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. I cannot really add to what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said on a previous occasion.

Mr. Woodburn: Can the right hon. Gentleman give us an assurance that the very valuable services of his information department in connection with his responsibilities for the economic wellbeing of Scotland will be in no way subject to any restriction or interference by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?

Mr. Maclay: I have already learned how valuable these services are, and I have no reason to believe that they will be interfered with in any way whatsoever.

Marriage and Divorce and Law of Succession

Mr. Hector: Hughes asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he is aware of the desirability of legislation to implement by separate legislation for Scotland the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce and also the Report of the Mackintosh Committee regarding the law of succession in Scotland; and if he will state the policy of Her Majesty's Government with regard to the implementation by legislation of both or either of these Reports or any of the recommendations contained in them.

Mr. Maclay: The Royal Commission's Report contains many recommendations which would require legislation. All are being thoroughly examined and I am undertaking consultations about some of them.
With regard to the Report of the Mackintosh Committee on the law of succession in Scotland, I cannot say more at present than that there is no prospect of legislation during this Session.

Mr. Hughes: Could the Secretary of State tell the Prime Minister that, in not finding time to implement the valuable recommendations of Royal Commissions, the Government are guilty of a public scandal and waste of public time, and will he expedite the implementation of these recommendations?

Forth Road Bridge

Mr. Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland in view of the need to expedite the development of the country's natural resources, what steps he is now taking to advance substantially the date for the commencement of work on the construction of a Forth road bridge.

Sir W. Anstruther-Gray: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is now in a position to make a statement about the Forth road bridge.

Mr. Maclay: I am very glad to be able to announce the outcome of the discussions in which my predecessor had been very actively and effectively engaged for some time past.
The Government have now considered the technical report to which my right hon. Friend referred in a previous reply, and have agreed that the layout for the full scheme of the bridge and approach roads as prepared by the Forth Road Bridge Joint Board should be adhered to, subject to further discussion of certain minor points and on the understanding that the cost does not materially exceed the present estimates prepared by the Board's consultants, namely, £l4·3 millions in all.
As announced earlier, the local authorities and the Government will contribute £500,000 and £4,650,000, respectively to the cost of the bridge, and the balance, subject to the necessary Parliamentary powers being obtained, will be advanced by the Government by way of loans which will be repayable from the proceeds of tolls. The Board was authorised last year to take the preparatory work to the contract-letting stage, and I have now informed it that when the preparatory work is completed it may proceed to invite tenders.
In short, this is the green light to carry on with the scheme, and I hope it will enable the actual work of construction to begin next year.

Mr. Hamilton: That is satisfactory so far as it goes, but will the Minister be more specific about the date at which the work will start; and secondly, will he give reconsideration to this very controversial question of tolls? Is he aware that there is great dissatisfaction on all sides in the country as a whole at what is regarded as a quite unnecessary and obsolete method of financing these projects?

Mr. Maclay: The answer to the first part of the supplementary question is that subject to the progress made by the Joint Board it is hoped that actual work may begin in the summer of 1958. As to the second part of the question about tolls, I do not accept that the toll system is obsolete. There are many toll bridges in operation in many parts of the world, including the United States of America and Europe.

Sir W. Anstruther-Gray: Is my right hon. Friend aware that his statement will be very widely welcomed throughout Scotland, and that, so far as the matter of tolls is concerned, he will have a very large measure of support for the stand that he has taken?

Mr. Woodburn: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the whole of Scotland will welcome the fact that we have now reached the point where it looks as if we have come to the "end of an auld sane"? This has been going on for about thirty years, and I think the people of Scotland will welcome the decision. We hope that the bridge will be built, as the right hon. Gentleman has said it will. Once the bridge is built, we can easily get rid of the tolls.

Fife (Industrial Development)

Mr. Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what action he proposes to take on the recommendations contained in the Report of the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) on industrial development in Fife.

Mr. Maclay: This Report has not as yet been submitted to me by the Scottish Council.

Mr. Hamilton: Has the right hon. Gentleman not taken steps to get a copy? Is he not sufficiently interested in the future of a developing mining area on

which the very prosperity of the country depends? Is it not time that he awoke from the lethargy and apathy which he displayed when he was Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation?

Mr. Maclay: The hon. Gentleman is, I think, jumping ahead of his own knowledge, because, as I understand it, the Fife Report has not yet been formally adopted by the Council's executive committee. Of course, if the Council cares to send it to me, as it is open to it to do, I shall be very glad to see what it says.

Highlands (Motor Fuel Rationing)

Mr. G. M. Thomson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what answer he has made to the representations of Lord Cameron, Q.C., as Chairman of the Highlands Advisory Panel, regarding the inadequacy of the petrol rationing arrangements to meet the special geographical conditions of the Scottish Highlands.

Mr. Maclay: I have received general representations on this subject from the Advisory Panel on the Highlands and Islands, and I have communicated them to my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation and my noble Friend the Minister of Power. Their regional officers have already been instructed to maintain essential supplies to country areas and to give special consideration to cases where the livelihood of the applicant is involved. A reply has been sent to Lord Cameron to this effect.

Mr. G. M. Thomson: Can the Secretary of State say whether special arrangements are going to be made to preserve the tourist industry in the Highlands in the summer?

Mr. Maclay: That is a question on which discussions are going on. It presents certain difficulties, but the matter is very much under consideration.

Mr. Woodburn: I hope the right hon. Gentleman has made it clear to the Minister of Power that if the Highland hotel industry collapses during this summer while hotels on the Continent are booming because they get free petrol over there, there will be the greatest resentment throughout the whole of Scotland.

Oral Answers to Questions — AIRCRAFT ACCIDENTS (INQUIRY PROCEDURE)

Mr. de Freitas: asked the Prime Minister whether he will now make a statement on changes in the procedure of inquiries into aircraft accidents when both Service and civilian Departments are concerned.

The Prime Minister (Mr. Harold Macmillan): The procedure is under review, but it is not yet possible to make a statement.

Mr. de Freitas: Will the Prime Minister look at his predecessor's Answer and see what can be done to speed matters up? Is he not aware that at present it is most unsatisfactory to have the Service authorities blaming the civilian authorities and the civilian authorities blaming the Service authorities, the confidence of both being undermined, in a serious matter such as the Vulcan crash?

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir, but as the hon. Gentleman, with his experience, will know, there are a number of complex and difficult points involved. We are taking up this question as rapidly as possible, but I am afraid that it may be some little time before a final statement can be made.

Oral Answers to Questions — MILITARY OPERATIONS

Mr. Lewis: asked the Prime Minister if he will introduce legislation making it mandatory upon Her Majesty's Government before commencing armed conflict with any country to discuss the political and economic issues involved in the House of Commons.

The Prime Minister: I would refer the hon. Gentleman to the reply I gave last Tuesday to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Clackmannan and East Stirlingshire (Mr. Woodburn).

Mr. Lewis: I anticipated that Reply. May I now ask the Prime Minister to say whether he agrees that it would have been better, particularly as we all know now that there was a split in the Cabinet and that Ministers resigned, if, before commencing war with Egypt, he had discussed it in this House and thus saved us the difficulties of petrol rationing, unemployment, and the millions of

pounds which he and his previous Government let the people of this country in for?

The Prime Minister: The hon. Gentleman may be interested to know that the words which I used in my reply last Tuesday were precisely the same, with the necessary substitution in the Royal title, as those used by Lord Attlee on 14th March, 1946.

Mr. Gaitskell: Is the Prime Minister aware that a matter of this kind is best left to the judgment of the Prime Minister concerned and the strength of mind of the members of the Cabinet, and that in both cases, in our opinion, they were deficient in recent months?

The Prime Minister: While not wishing to enter into needless controversy, I think that the right hon. Gentleman, if he looks back upon his record, has very little to be proud of.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTER FOR WELSH AFFAIRS

Mr. C. Hughes: asked the Prime Minister the Government's policy in connection with the future functions of the Minister for Welsh Affairs.

The Prime Minister: The Minister for Welsh Affairs, like his predecessor, will keep himself continuously informed of the Welsh aspects of public business, and for that purpose will be visiting different parts of the Principality and meeting representatives of Welsh life. He will speak in Cabinet on behalf of the special interests of Wales. I think that the change has already been widely welcomed in Wales whereby these functions will be discharged by a Minister who has executive responsibility over the great range of matters affecting Wales which come within his concern as Minister of Housing and Local Government.

Mr. Bevan: Can the right hon. Gentleman, therefore, explain why it was that the Home Secretary was selected in the first instance? As these facts were precisely the same at that time, why has the change been made?

The Prime Minister: Perhaps because he was a Scotsman.

Mr. Hughes: Can the Prime Minister say whether a Parliamentary Secretary is to be appointed to look after Welsh affairs and to take the place of the Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department who looked after Welsh affairs?

The Prime Minister: My right hon. Friend will himself be responsible for matters affecting the Principality.

Mr. G. Thomas: In view of the fact that the Minister of Housing and Local Government has a full-time job looking after that Department, does the Prime Minister not think that it is quite unfair to Wales that he should now add to the burden of the Minister by not granting a Parliamentary Secretary such as there has been in office hitherto?

The Prime Minister: One of the difficulties, of course, is that I have no legal power to do so.

Oral Answers to Questions — MR. NEHRU (DISCUSSIONS)

Mr. E. Fletcher: asked the Prime Minister if he will make a statement as to the outcome of the discussions with Mr. Nehru.

The Prime Minister: I would refer the hon. Gentleman to the reply I gave last Tuesday to the hon. Gentleman the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Lewis).

Mr. Fletcher: Will the Prime Minister say whether Mr. Nehru gave the Government the benefit of any advice as to how to improve Anglo-American relations?

The Prime Minister: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will accept that conversations of this kind cannot be helpful or fruitful if reports of them are to be made; they are confidential. They are valuable between Prime Ministers of different parts of the Commonwealth.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTER OF DEFENCE (CHIEF OF STAFF)

Mr. Bellenger: asked the Prime Minister to what extent he proposes that the Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defence shall represent the views of the three Service Chiefs of Staff when technical advice is desired on military matters by the Government.

The Prime Minister: As I stated on 24th January, the corporate responsibility of the Chiefs of Staff as the professional military advisers of the Government will remain unchanged. By virtue of his experience, the Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defence will be well aware on which issues he can give advice from his own knowledge; which on the other hand require the collective advice of the Chiefs of Staff; and which require detailed examination by the responsible staffs.

Mr. Bellenger: In view of that Answer, is it not now more obvious than ever that the Prime Minister should endeavour to define more clearly the position of the staff officer to the Minister of Defence, because it is quite likely, particularly on issues of making high appointments, that he may be in conflict with the other Chiefs of Staff?

The Prime Minister: I do not think that that will arise and I hope that it will not do so. If it does, there is, of course, an appeal to the Cabinet or to the Prime Minister. I know the right hon. Gentleman's interest in these matters, and I think he will appreciate that I have tried to go as far as possible within the existing law to bring a greater degree of coordination and control under the Minister of Defence. I cannot go further without legislation, and it is very doubtful yet whether such legislation ought to be made or will be required.

Mr. Shinwell: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether his Answer means that when defence matters are under review by the Cabinet the Chiefs of Staff will be present for consultation and in order that their advice can be obtained, in addition to the Chief of Staff to the Defence Minister?

The Prime Minister: The right hon. Gentleman knows, from his long experience, that it is not the custom to make any reference to committees of the Cabinet, except the Defence Committee, which has been well known as an established method of procedure. At meetings of the full Defence Committee, the Chiefs of Staff and the Service Ministers will be present.

Mr. Shinwell: If the Chiefs of Staff representing the Service Departments are to attend the Defence Committee, which is under the jurisdiction of the Cabinet,


as the Prime Minister well knows, in addition to the Chief of Staff advising the Defence Minister, will there not be some lack of co-ordination?

The Prime Minister: Any change in that particular method of procedure would be a change which I do not think ought to be made without legislation.

Mr. Strachey: In view of what the Prime Minister has just said, will the Prime Minister tell us what change has been made from existing arrangements?

The Prime Minister: I think it is fairly clear from the directive which I have issued that it places a greater degree of responsibility upon the Minister of Defence. I am satisfied that he and the Service Ministers and all the officers concerned welcome this procedure and are prepared to work it.

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE (WRITTEN ANSWER)

Mr. Brockway: I desire, Mr. Speaker, to raise a point of order of which I have given you notice and of which I have informed the Ministry of Defence, the Department concerned. Yesterday, I tabled a Question for Written Answer by the Ministry of Defence. I received a reply, which was also circulated to the Press. The reply was to the following effect:
Defence expenditure in 1956–57 is expected to be approximately £1,540 million of which about £35 million is extra expenditure due to the Suez crisis. The total would be £1,620 million before taking account of United States aid and German support costs.
That was the Written Answer which was given to me in reply to my request for a Written Answer. It was circulated to the Press. It appears widely in the Press today. It appears in the leading news page of The Times and it has gone all over the world. Yet when HANSARD, the OFFICIAL REPORT, reached me this morning, the last sentence had been omitted. The sentence:
The total would be £1,620 million before taking account of United States aid and German support costs
does not appear in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
When that happened, I asked you, Mr. Speaker, whether I might raise the matter in the House and I informed the Ministry of Defence. Meanwhile, I received a

letter from the Ministry of Defence, who stated:
You have, no doubt, already noticed that the reply to your Question"—
I am omitting certain words which are irrelevant—
differs slightly from the reply which was sent to you. This is due to a misunderstanding in this office, and I wish to apologise for any confusion that may have arisen from our error.
That statement was no explanation of the omission of these vital words.
Through your help, Mr. Speaker, I have since obtained further facts. The Official Reporters state that they received a telephone message from the Ministry that the sentence referred to should be omitted, and this was confirmed by the Minister's Private Secretary. The point I wish to raise with you is whether the Ministry has the right to correct an Answer after it has been given to the Member who asked for the Written Answer and after it has been distributed to the Press. Surely, when a Member asks for a Written Answer, and when it is provided to him through the ordinary channels, that is the authentic Answer just as though an Oral Answer were given in the House. The limitation of the right to amend an Answer substantially should, in my submission, apply to a Written Answer as in the case of an Oral Answer.
In any event, if the Ministry was correcting the OFFICIAL REPORT in this way, should it not have informed the Member of Parliament and the Press? Instead of that, however, it was not until this morning that either the Member of Parliament concerned or the Press was informed of this serious deletion from the Answer. I wish to ask you, Mr. Speaker, what conduct a Member of Parliament should pursue when there has been this seeming breach and interference with the official record?

Mr. Speaker: I have made some inquiry into this matter, although I was not aware, until the hon. Member informed us, of the letter which he has received from the Ministry of Defence. This was, of course, a Written Answer to a Question. I find that a revised Answer was supplied by the Ministry of Defence to the Official Reporters, who printed and published it, as they were well entitled to do, but that an earlier draft was sent by the Ministry inadvertently to the hon. Member and to the


Press. I am satisfied that no blame attaches to the Official Reporters in this matter. I consider that Departments should take great care that the Answer supplied to a Member and that supplied to the Official Reporters for publication are in identical terms.

Mr. Gaitskell: While thanking you for your statement, Mr. Speaker, may I ask whether it would not be appropriate for a statement to be made by the Government? Two points arise. The Minister of Defence, as we know, is in Washington. Who is acting on his behalf during his absence? Secondly, can we have some explanation of the rather extraordinary behaviour of the Ministry of Defence?

The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Lord Privy Seal (Mr. R. A. Butler): I have been informed of this matter and of the fact that the hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway) intended to raise it and I have made some inquiries. I would like to say that no fault whatever attaches to the printers or to HANSARD, who printed the Answer that was sent to them. I have also made inquiries in the Ministry of Defence, by whom I was informed that there was great pressure of work in the office prior to the Minister's departure to America. They very much regret the mistake that was made.
I have considered whether any action would be appropriate on the part of the House, but as this matter has had full publicity, and as Mr. Speaker's remarks will be printed in HANSARD, I do not see that I can make any proposal which would make the matter any clearer than it has been made already. What we ought to do is to accept the apology from the Minister of Defence in his absence and from the Ministry itself and to register in the OFFICIAL REPORT, in which the matter will be officially reported, Mr. Speaker's words; and an apology should be made to the hon. Member for the fact that there was a difference between the original Answer sent to him and the one printed in HANSARD. I think that that is the best way we can deal with the matter.

Mr. Shinwell: Will the Leader of the House be good enough to tell hon. Members why this deletion was made at the last minute? What is the purpose of it? Was there something to conceal? Will he

make inquiries of the Ministry of Defence and inform us all about this?

Mr. Butler: I did make inquiries, because I wanted to be quite sure what was the motive behind this. I was informed by those responsible for this action that they thought that the information contained in the shortened Answer would, in fact, answer the Written Question which the hon. Member had put. They therefore amended the original Answer, thinking that that was sufficient information to give in reply to the hon. Member. Whether they made a mistake or not has now been indicated by the apology which has been made. I do not think that we can take the matter further.

Mr. S. Silverman: May I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, with all respect, that the matter is still a little ambiguous? One appreciates that when an apology is offered to the House it normally accepts it, but what is not clear is what the apology is for. What we are concerned with here is the accuracy of the OFFICIAL REPORT. The Minister may well apologise for having sent my hon. Friend the wrong answer, or he may apologise for having sent to the OFFICIAL REPORTERS the wrong answer, but the point which I think does need clarifying is this. When a Minister has given a Written Answer to an hon. Member who has asked for a Written Answer, is my hon. Friend right or wrong in the suggestion that he made to you that that is for all purposes the Answer to his Question precisely as though it had been given orally?
If my hon. Friend is right in that, then it is quite clear that that is the Answer which ought to have been printed in the OFFICIAL REPORT, and that what the Minister of Defence had no right whatever to do was to seek to alter the report of his Answer after his Answer had been given. It is, of course, important to see that the Answer given to the Member and the Answer given to the OFFICIAL REPORT for recording purposes should be in the same terms, but if the matter is left there the question is left in ambiguity as to what is the correct Answer in the first place and what interference there has been with the compilation of the record.

Mr. Ede: Surely the original Answer was initialled by the Minister or by his Parliamentary Secretary. Who initialled the alteration? Was it a Ministerial


alteration, or was it an alteration made by a civil servant? It is very important that in these matters we should be quite certain that the Answer given is that of the Minister. This is particularly true of Answers to Questions for Written Answer, because it is a great advantage to Ministers to have Questions for Written Answer rather than for Oral Answer, and it is also a great convenience to the House, because a great many Questions appear on the Order Paper that appear to me to be more suitable for Written Answer than for Oral Answer. If there is to be any differentiation between the Ministerial treatment of the two it may lead to an increase in the number of Questions for Oral Answer. Was this answer altered Ministerially? If so, by whom?

Mr. Butler: Yes, Sir. I can relieve the right hon. Gentleman's anxiety. The responsibility for this rests entirely on the Minister of Defence, who accepts responsibility for the alteration.

Mr. Rankin: But who did the job?

Mr. Butler: There really is no great mystery about this. The hon. Member's Question referred to the estimated amount to be spent on defence during the current year, including supplementary costs arising from the conflict with Egypt and the maintenance of armed forces in Cyprus; and the answer, as truncated, that is, without the last sentence, does give those relevant facts. It was the Minister's second thought that that was a sufficient answer. In fact, the first Answer had gone out with the total figure. My right hon. Friend has made an apology, and I hope that that apology will now be accepted. The first part of the Answer answered the Question.

Mr. Gaitskell: While it may be unreasonable to expect the Home Secretary to explain the mental processes of either officials of the Ministry of Defence or of the Minister of Defence, would not the right hon. Gentleman agree that the best way to clear up this matter is for the Minister of Defence to make a statement on it as soon as he gets back from Washington?

Mr. Butler: I am not in a position to consult my right hon. Friend today, but I certainly think that the right hon. Gentleman's question should be put to him.

Air Commodore Harvey: Will my right hon. Friend say who is the Minister responsible to this House in the absence of the Minister of Defence?

Hon. Members: Answer.

Mr. Speaker: We cannot wait all day for an answer.

Mr. Bevan: Surely we ought to have an answer to that question? The Prime Minister gave the impression to the House that a very important change had been made in the relationship between the Ministry of Defence and the Service Departments. The more we have investigated the matter, the more we have discovered that it is a mere facade and that no substantial change has been made. Now it transpires that while the Minister of Defence is absent from the country there is no one to answer for him in the House of Commons and, therefore, no one apparently to initial answers to Questions in the House of Commons except an official of this Department. If, in the absence of the Minister of Defence, a Minister did initial these Answers, perhaps we can be told his name.

Mr. Butler: There is no difficulty about this. I was answering as Leader of the House, first, because I thought that there might be a question of courtesy to the hon. Member who raised the Question, and, secondly, because I was anxious to support Mr. Speaker in relation to HANSARD, who have not made any mistake whatsoever and have printed what they were sent. These are matters concerning the House, and I thought that it was right for me to answer. The Secretary of State for War is to answer for the Minister of Defence, if so desired, and will be dealing with defence Questions tomorrow. So there is really no difficulty about this matter of responsibility.

Several Hon. Members: Several Hon. Membersrose—

Mr. Speaker: I think we ought to pass from this matter if the House agrees. [HON. MEMBERS: "NO."] An apology has been made. It is clear that a mistake has been made. I would not stop the House, if it wishes to pursue the matter, but the ordinary custom in this House, when someone apologises for some mistake, is to accept the apology.

Mr. Dugdale: I should like to ask what exactly was the answer to the question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede), Have we been told that, first, the original Answer and then the Answer sent to the Press were initialled by a Minister? Or were they not initialled by a Minister? The fact that a Minister accepts responsibility is quite a different matter. We want to know whether the actual initialling was done by the Minister concerned.

Mr. Butler: I have already said that the Minister himself takes the responsibility. [HON. MEMBERS: "Answer the question."] On leaving for the United States of America he asked his Private Secretary to write to the hon. Member for Eton and Slough, who raised this point. In a letter of 29th January, of which I have a copy here, the Private Secretary, explaining the position, said:
I wish to apologise for any confusion that may have arisen from our error.
I think that that, also, might have been mentioned by the hon. Member.

Mr. Brockway: May I remind you, Mr. Speaker, that I actually quoted the letter to which the right hon. Gentleman has referred? I do not think that it is quite fair for him to suggest that I have withheld it from the House. I quoted it.

Hon. Members: The right hon. Gentleman should withdraw.

Lieut.-Colonel Bromley-Davenport: Is it not a fact that the people of this country could not care less who initialled what? Have we not already wasted enough of our time and of the taxpayers' money? Has not a full apology been made already—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."]—and can we not now get on with the Orders of the Day?

Hon. Members: No.

Mr. E. Fletcher: In view of the wide publicity that has been given the original and fuller Answer, would the Lord Privy Seal now tell the House whether the full reply was accurate or inaccurate and, if it was accurate, why part of it was deleted?

Mr. Speaker: I do not see how that question can be answered by the Lord Privy Seal. Some time ago the hon.
Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) rose to put some questions to me, but I was not given an opportunity to reply to them. I am quite unable to answer his conundrum as to which should be considered the authentic text of the Answer. That I do not know, and I think that the matter can only be cleared up by a subsequent Question, because I am not responsible for the accuracy of the Answer. Only the Department can tell us that. I think that was the point about which the hon. Member asked me, but there was another one which I have forgotten.

Mr. S. Silverman: If I may say so with respect, that was part of the Question, Mr. Speaker. The point that I had in mind, and which I think my hon. Friend the Member for Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway) also had in mind, was this. Suppose a Minister inadvertently, in answer to an Oral Question, includes a couple of sentences which, on second thoughts, he thinks he might better have left out. It is perfectly clear that he could not then, with propriety, alter the report in HANSARD. The question which, with respect, ought to be considered some time is whether, when a Minister has done exactly the same thing in a Written Answer he ought to be entitled, with propriety, to do what he could not have done if he had given an Oral Answer.

Mr. Speaker: This difference will at once strike the House. In the case of Oral Aswer, the reporters take a note of what is actually said and, therefore, they have a check on any subsequent version of the Answer that may be put to them.
The proper practice for a Minister or any hon. Member, if he wishes to make a correction in the OFFICIAL REPORT, other than a merely verbal one—that is, if he wishes to alter the sense apart from the terms in which that sense has been expressed—is to make the alteration in a separate statement to the House. He should rise and say, "On that occasion I said this in error. The true facts are as follows," and so on. That is the way it is done. But the House will realise that in the case of a Written Answer all that the reporter has is the document. He has nothing with which to check it and is bound to print what he is given.
As to whether a Minister is entitled to alter the text of a Written Answer, to answer that one would have to know the precise facts. I should imagine that he is entitled to alter it at any time up to its transmission to the hon. Member. That is what I should say, hut, of course, mistakes do happen and if a wrong copy of the Answer has been supplied to the reporters I see nothing wrong myself in the Minister's office correcting a mistake of that character. But what I have said—and I hope that it will be observed—is that the reply given to the hon. Member and the reply submitted to the reporters for publication should be identical. I hope that we can now pass on to other business.

Mr. Gaitskell: Is not the point here, Sir, that the authentic Answer in this case must be the Answer given to the hon. Member who puts the Question, and if the Minister decides afterwards that he wants to give a different Answer he ought to come to the House and give one.

Mr. Speaker: I think that that is probably right.

Mr. M. Stewart: Reference has been made to an apology and it appears that an expression of regret has been made to my hon. Friend the Member for Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway), but surely, if a Minister has given one Answer to the hon. Member who asked a Question and another to the Official Reporters, there is an offence to the House; and there has been no clear making of an apology to the House by the Minister responsible. The Minister is not here to do it, but we are told that the Secretary of State for War is his representative. Could he, therefore, make the apology which the circumstances require?

The Secretary of State for War (Mr. John Hare): All I can say to the hon. Member is that I will certainly convey to my right hon. Friend the Minister of

Defence the feelings that have been expressed on that side of the House. I am certain that my right hon. Friend will take a suitable opportunity of making a statement on the subject.

BILL PRESENTED

HOUSING AND TOWN DEVELOPMENT (SCOTLAND)

Bill to make new provision with respect to contributions out of the Exchequer and by local authorities in respect of housing accommodation provided or improved in Scotland; to enable Scottish local authorities to provide housing accommodation and other development in relief of the needs of districts other than their own; to make additional provision as respects Scotland for the making of payments in respect of unfit houses which have been well maintained, to provide as respects Scotland for the making and keeping by local authorities of registers of maximum rents of dwellings in respect of which improvement grants have been made, and far the simplifying of the procedure for the completion of the compulsory acquisition of land under certain enactments relating to housing; to amend certain provisions of the Housing (Scotland) Act, 1950; to extend section nineteen of the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act, 1945; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid, presented by Mr. John Maclay; supported by the Lord Advocate, the Solicitor-General for Scotland, Mr. J. Enoch Powell, and Mr. J. Nixon Browne; read the First time: to be read a Second time upon Thursday and to be printed. [Bill 47.]

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Proceedings on the Homicide Bill exempted, at this day's Sitting, from the provisions of Standing Order No. 1 (Sittings of the House).—[Mr. R. A. Butler.)

FRIENDLY SOCIETIES (MEMBERSHIP OF TRADE UNIONS)

3.55 p.m.

Mr. Ian Mikardo: I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to invalidate rules of friendly societies discriminating against membership of trade unions.
There are, happily, a considerable number of right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House who follow closely the problems which are involved in the maintenance and improvement of industrial relations, because it is common to all people of goodwill that in meeting the difficult economic situation which we have to face at present one of the most important requirements is the best possible relations in industry between management and workers and between one class of workers and another. Therefore, it is altogether heartening that interest in good relations in industry should be widespread and universal and not confined to one side or the other.
Those who have concerned themselves with this matter will know very well the point of the Bill, leave to bring in which I am here seeking, because the point is one which has been referred to by a number of my hon. Friends in one context or another in the House in the last few years. During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of this century a great deal of resistance has been shown, by at least some employers, to the growth of trade unionism amongst their manual and craft workers, but after a while it came to be generally realised that that was obscurantist.
Now, everybody in the country, except a handful of crackpots, accepts that it is in the widest national interest that both employers and employees should organise themselves in appropriate associations and unions in order to have a common voice in speaking to each other and with the Government of the day.
The resistance which formerly existed to membership of trade unions amongst craft and general workers has now almost entirely disappeared. It is fair to say that the measure of comparative industrial peace which we have enjoyed in this country for thirty years is to no small

extent due to the fact that employers' organisations and trade unions have flourished and people have been able to enter them as they wished, and no undue pressures or influences have been applied to try to prevent their entering these organisations.
The picture, however, is not quite complete. The resistance which was formerly shown by some employers to the growth of trade unions among what I might call their shop-floor workers has now been transferred to a resistance to the growth of trade unionism among what may broadly be called the white-collar workers—the foremen charge-hands, the departmental heads, managers, technicians, designers, draughtsmen and office managers.
These are classes of personnel whose place in the industrial structure and whose relations with other people in the industrial structure are of the highest importance. Many of them are the bridge between the higher management and the workers. Many of them are the interpreters of the views of management and workers to each other and, most important, and this is a commonplace among people working in industry, the first-level supervisor—generally the foreman—is really the determinant of the industrial relationship of the organisation.
One can be fairly sure that if a man starts work in a new job and goes home at the end of the first day and says, "I do not think so much of this firm", what he is really saying, almost without realising it is, "I have had a look at my foreman and I do not like him." And vice versa, if the foreman impinges well on him, he thinks well of the firm.
Therefore, these relations are very important indeed, and have in recent times been greatly improved by people of the managerial, sub-managerial and technical classes coming into the trade union movement and, as a result, being able to speak on terms of friendship and comradeship and equality with all the other millions of workers in the trade union movement.
So it seems to be a mistake, even in their own interests, for employers to resist this development. Unhappily, some employers do resist it, not by the crude, overt, bludgeoning methods by which they resisted general trade unionism half


a century ago, but by more subtle means. One of these means is the sponsorship by employers' organisations of friendly and benefit societies, which are worthy institutions of themselves and do good work, and to the membership of which they nominate their foremen and other people, but only on condition that such persons are not, or do not remain, members of a trade union.
Now this is a subtle compulsion, but it is a quite powerful compulsion in some organisations, if a new man comes in at the foremanship level, it is sometimes quietly hinted to him, and sometimes said to him overtly, that his future hopes of promotion depend to some extent upon whether he joins the club. Joining the club means that he has to give up membership of a trade union or has to undertake never to join one. There have been occasions when these methods were applied to companies engaged on Government contracts and then, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Southwark (Mr. Isaacs) knows, because he had some first-hand dealings with this matter, the operation of the fair wages clause has been brought into play because these things conflict with the clause.
In general, this subtle pressure has considerable effect, and the trade union movement as a whole has been very much perturbed about it for a long time. That is why, for thirty years, year after year, the annual Trades Union Congress has expressed concern about this matter.
That is why I am joined in the sponsorship of this Bill, and I am very grateful for it, by a number of my hon. Friends who, between them, speak with the voices of many millions of organised workers.
I am sure that hon. Members on all sides of the House who want to see the best industrial relations, and who welcome the extent to which, over and over again the trade union movement gives assistance and advice to Governments of all colours, will want to see this somewhat nineteenth century anomaly removed, and will want to see that these worthy institutions go on being open to all people who keep to the rules and pay their subscriptions and behave themselves, but should not debar people on the ground only that such people are members of trade unions.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Ian Mikardo, Mr. Herbert Butler, Mr. Collins, Mr. Gibson, Mr. Frederick Lee, Mr. Charles Pannell, Mr. Popplewell, and Mr. Frederick Willey.

FRIENDLY SOCIETIES (MEMBERSHIP OF TRADE UNIONS)

Bill to invalidate rules of friendly societies discriminating against membership of trade unions, presented accordingly and read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Friday, 15th February and to be printed. [Bill 48.]

Orders of the Day — HOMICIDE BILL

Considered in Committee [Progress 28th January, 1957].

[Sir CHARLES MACANDREW in the Chair]

New Clause.—(REVIEW OF SENTENCES.)

The duties and powers of the Secretary of State for the Home Department as to the periodic reconsideration and review of sentences upon persons convicted of murder shall be exercised in like manner in relation to all sentences passed upon a person originally charged with murder or with capital murder who has on conviction been sentenced to any term of imprisonment.—[Mr. Anthony Greenwood.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

4.5 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
We have brought forward this proposed Clause because it raises a point upon which we would like to have assurances from the Government. In this Bill we are making certain changes in respect of the law of murder. For example, we are designating certain cases of homicide as manslaughter instead of murder, as they would have been before, and we are also accepting the doctrine of diminished responsibility. It therefore seemed probable to us on this side of the Committee that in the future we shall be seeing a term of years awarded in cases in which, up to the present, the death sentence has been the appropriate one, possibly followed by a reprieve and the substitution of life imprisonment.
It seemed to us reasonable to suggest that in such cases the sentence should be reviewed on the same principles as are applied in the case of life sentences at present. We all know that life sentences are not, in fact, life sentences but a great deal shorter, and that there has been a tendency over the years for the average term of imprisonment to get shorter and shorter. In paragraph 644 of the Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment we are told the circumstances under which the Secretary of State reviews the sentences on imprisoned murderers at least every four years, and the Home Office stated, before the Royal Commission, that the basic principle was as follows:

The punishment must be sufficient to deter others and to be accepted by public opinion as an adequate vindication of the law; it ought not to suggest that the crime of murder is regarded lightly by the State or can be put on the same level with other crimes. It is therefore desirable to grade the terms as far as possible according to the degree of culpability in each case. Account must also be taken of the length of sentences imposed by the Courts for other offences.
Subject to that basic principle, the Home Office tell us that weight is given to three considerations: first, the character and behaviour of the prisoner during his period of imprisonment; secondly, the likelihood of his committing other crimes if he is released and, thirdly, the effect of a long term of imprisonment upon the prisoner's health.
In my view, there are two considerations which are of special importance in this connection. In the first case the White Paper on Capital Punishment, which was issued by the Labour Government, in 1948, showed that released murderers seldom commit further crimes of violence. The second consideration is the effect of a long term of imprisonment upon the prisoner himself, and whether it is likely to produce further moral degeneration in him.
Upon that second point there are conflicting views, as I well appreciate and I know that changes in prison administration have probably tended over the last twenty-five years, in spite of overcrowding of prisons, to make the effects of a long term of imprisonment perhaps less serious than they were in the past. However, I want to bring to the attention of the Committee the evidence which Sir Alexander Paterson gave to the Select Committee in 1930. He said:
Whatever means of education, stimulation and recreation may be employed, however you may seek to ring the changes on handicrafts and literature, skittles or chess or ping-pong, despite the invaluable labours of most devoted voluntary workers, it requires a superman to survive 20 years of imprisonment with character and soul intact … I gravely doubt whether an average man can serve more than ten continuous year, in prison without deterioration.
I think it is clear that the Home Secretary has reviewed these long periods of imprisonment with a good deal of understanding and sympathy. Now that the life sentence will not be imposed in many cases but instead a long period of imprisonment for a stated period will be imposed, it would be a great pity, I think,


if the Home Secretary did not continue to apply to these new cases the same principle as he has applied in the case of murderers in the past. It is because we should like to have assurances from the Government on the way they will review these sentences that we have tabled this new Clause.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. J. E. S. Simon): I am grateful for the opportunity which this new Clause gives to reassure the Committee that the same principles, as the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Anthony Greenwood) put it, will apply to the review of the new sentences which are likely to be imposed in cases where, formerly, a sentence of death was likely to have been imposed. I say "the same principles" because, for reasons which I think will become apparent, the terms of the new Clause are inappropriate, in that the reconsideration although it will be exercised on the same principle, cannot be exercised in like manner in relation to sentences of terms of years for manslaughter for example.
It might be convenient for the Committee if I dealt with this matter in two parts, first, dealing with the power of release, the power to remit part of a sentence, and then dealing with the administrative arrangements by which my right hon. Friend or any other holder of his office implement their powers of release.
In the first place, the power of release can either depend on the Prerogative of mercy or else can be a statutory power. The Prerogative of mercy exists not only to commute a death sentence to one of imprisonment for life, but it can also operate to release any prisoner, to remit the sentence of any prisoner, prematurely. The Prerogative power is exercised only in exceptional circumstances because in its nature it means that, where there is a sentence by the court, it is an interference with the court's jurisdiction over sentence; and, of course, my right hon. Friend does not exist as a court of appeal from the sentences imposed by courts of justice.
It is exercised in cases where compassionate considerations are overwhelming, for example, if a prisoner is fatally ill and it is obviously desirable that he should be released unconditionally. In those

cases the Prerogative power is used, because the release is not on licence but is an absolute remission of the remainder of the sentence.
The second group of powers which the Secretary of State exercises in this respect is a group of statutory powers which fall into two parts—the release on licence and the absolute remission of the remainder of the sentence. The release on licence applies primarily to life sentences, and it applies to life sentences whether they are fixed by the court or result from the respiting of the death penalty. The powers exist by virtue of a provision of the Prison Act, 1952, and also, in the case of young persons, by virtue of a provision of the Children and Young Persons Act.
4.15 p.m.
In the case of sentences of the court other than life sentences, it is only in the minority of cases that the release is on licence. These are, again, statutory provisions, and they apply in the case of a young person who is released on licence and not unconditionally released. There are also provisions for corrective training and preventive detention, where the release is on licence.
In the generality of cases, however, the release is not on licence. Where a term of years has been fixed by the court there is a discharge of the prisoner, ordinarily speaking, when two-thirds of the sentence has expired and when the discharge has been earned by good behaviour. In administrative practice this works the other way round and the concession is forfeited by bad behaviour, but as the Statute stands it has to be earned by good behaviour, and rules have been made for that purpose.
So much for my right hon. Friend's powers. The administrative arrangements for review exist for the purposes to which the hon. Member for Rossendale referred; they enable the sentence to be considered in the light of the circumstances of the case, the progress which the prisoner has made and also the current practice of the court in imposing fixed sentences for other offences, particularly offences of violence, where the tendency recently, I think, has been for the court to impose less drastic sentences than formerly. The problem to be determined is whether the time is now approaching when the prisoner can properly be


released on licence. It is also a means of bringing to light any special circumstances or compassionate considerations which might warrant the exceptional course of recommending some remission of the sentence oy the exercise of the Prerogative.
In the case of a life sentence, whether it is a commuted death sentence or has been imposed by the court, the practice is to review at the end of the first year's imprisonment and again at the end of the fourth, eighth and twelfth year, and so on. That is the periodic review, but, in addition, there is a special review when any petition is presented by a prisoner or a representation made by a person on a prisoner's behalf. That is in the case of a life sentence.
The practice is slightly different in the case of a sentence of a term of years imposed by the court. In this case there is still a review whenever a petition is presented or representation made, because it is thought right to examine the cases of prisoners serving long sentences on representation, quite apart from the periodic review; but a periodic review is also thought necessary in those cases, quite apart from review on petitions and representations, and in this instance the review is at the end of the fourth and eighth years' imprisonment but not at the end of the first year. The Committee will see that it applies only in the case of long, fixed sentences where the sentence is more than six years; otherwise the prisoners will have been released at the time when the review would take place.
The purpose of the new Clause is to ensure that the existing practice, which I have tried to outline to the Committee, shall continue. I hope that I have said sufficient to reassure the Committee about the way it will be operated where a sentence is for a term of years for manslaughter. The actual terms of the new Clause are inappropriate, because where there is a sentence for a fixed term there is no question of release on licence, whereas, to use the words of the new Clause, a review of sentences upon persons convicted of murder involves a release on licence. I hope that I have made the point clear. If it is a life sentence, there is a release on licence under statutory powers, but if it is for a term of years,

the release is not on licence, but normally at the end of two-thirds of the term of years.

Mr. Leslie Hale: I thank the hon. and learned Member for that information. He will bear in mind that the new Clause was drafted to deal with a speech which he made when he did not occupy the prominent position which he now occupies and did not have access to all the information to which he now has access.

Mr. Simon: I thought that that might be in the hon. Member's mind and I have done my best to replenish my stores of information since coming to my present office.
If I may recapitulate for the benefit of the Committee so that I can make plain how this review will take place, where a person is convicted of capital murder the case will be reviewed, to see whether there are grounds for recommending the exercise of the Royal Prerogative. If there are, the sentence will be commuted to one of life imprisonment and reviewed in accordance with the current practice, and the power to release on licence will apply. The position of the under-18s will remain unchanged.
Where a person is convicted of non-capital murder and is over 18, he will be sentenced to life imprisonment and again, the case will be reviewed under the existing arrangements and the power to release on licence will apply. Where a person is charged with either capital murder or murder and is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to life imprisonment, the sentence will be reviewed under existing arrangements and the power to license will apply.
It is only in the fourth case that the new Clause is not appropriate. That is where a person is charged with capital murder or murder and is convicted of either manslaughter or a lesser crime, such as wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm. In that case the sentence will be reviewed every four years, as are existing sentences, but there will be no power to release on licence and the sentence can be shortened only either by the exercise of the Royal Prerogative in exceptional or compassionate cases, or under the statutory power to


remit one-third of the sentence for good behaviour, when the release is not on licence. I am empowered by my right hon. Friend to assure the Committee that he intends to continue the existing practice and the existing principles of reviews.

Mr. R. T. Paget: That seems to be one of the most unsatisfactory replies that I have ever heard. The new Clause is directed, and solely directed, to what the Joint Under-Secretary called the fourth case. I certainly did not imagine, and I am sure that nobody else imagined, that there would be any change in the procedure in the case of a life sentence. What the Bill provides is that in cases where, previously, there would be life sentences, that is, the case of the diminished responsibility, there shall now be sentences for terms of years. The whole and only point of the new Clause, which would make no other change in the practice, is that men who would previously have been sentenced to imprisonment for life on a commuted death sentence shall not be in a worse position as a result of the Bill—and they are as the Bill stands.
I will quote a case in which precisely this trouble occurred. A boy doing his National Service, because somebody had been rude to him—I think in a tea queue —proceeded to get a rifle, shoot a fellow with it and then shoot at two other people, wounding one. Very fortunately, the people who were shot recovered. The boy was given fifteen years' sentence for attempted murder. Three things might have happened, First, in prison he might have turned out to be insane, in which case he would have gone to a lunatic asylum. Secondly, he might have turned out to be an irredeemable psychiatric personality, a psychopath, in which case, for his own safety and for that of the community, he ought not to have been allowed to be at large. Thirdly, he might have been just temporarily psychologically ill, in which case he ought to have been released as soon as it was safe.
In that case I asked the Court of Appeal on his behalf, to turn the fifteen years' sentence into a life sentence, and the Court did so. I will not mention the boy's name, but the hon. and learned Member will find that his Department is familiar with it, because I had conversations about it at the time with his

predecessor. It is precisely that sort of case which we had in mind to be covered by the new Clause.
If his victims had been killed and the Bill had been in operation, clearly it would have been a case of diminished responsibility. That is precisely the sort of case in which one wants to take power to keep him out of harm's way, to keep him from endangering himself and the community, but, on the other hand, precisely because of his diminished responsibility one does not want particularly to punish him. The whole basis of his sentence is that it is not really his fault, but he must be taken away to stop him endangering people. There is a long sentence and it is a sentence which ought to be under review all the time, so that he may be released on licence when it has been decided that the factor which diminished his responsibility has been cured and it is safe to let him out. That is the most important case of the lot for keeping under review and for considering release on licence.
It was said that the Home Office should not be a court of appeal from the judge but in that sort of case that is precisely what the Home Office should be. The court has said that a murder has been committed, but the man, without being insane, is of diminished responsibility and not really to blame for what he did. We have to put him away for the safety of the community and not really to punish him, because nobody wants to punish people who are not responsible for what they do.
He is handed over to the Home Office in those circumstances to see whether, if and when he is cured, he is responsible enough to be let out. Of course, quite a proportion of these people will go to lunatic asylums and will never be let out. It is those whose mentality deteriorates. However, some will be cured. Some will get better. Those will be let out and are the people whom the new Clause would cover. It makes no difference to anybody else.
In the light of that explanation, I hope that the Home Office will reconsider this matter, even if it should have the horrifying result that there might be more than a formal Report stage. The Home Secretary will recognise that we have in no way obstructed here. He need not be


frightened of more than a formal Report stage. This is a useful and valuable power and a necessary power, because tile power to license in the case of the man who is sentenced to a term of years, precisely because he is of diminished responsibility, is not a power which exists at the moment.
It is a power which is required in that sort of case more pre-eminently than in any other sort of case. We do not want constantly to be going to the Court of Appeal, asking it to convert a term of years into a life sentence, as I actually had to do on that occasion. I ask the hon. and learned Gentleman to consider very carefully whether this valuable and useful addition to the right hon. Gentleman's powers as Home Secretary ought not to be included in the Bill, seeing what we are doing in the case of diminished responsibility.

4.30 p.m.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget), in part of his argument, used a more euphemistic form of expression than is habitual to him in the course of these discussions. He said that if a man charged with murder succeeded in advancing a defence of diminished responsibility he was then handed over to the Home Office in order to be kept out of harm's way and from harming himself or harming the community. That may be the intention of what is done with him, but it sounds to me an unusually euphemistic way in which to refer to a very long term of imprisonment. Actually, the sentence in the Bill is imprisonment for life is it not?

Mr. Paget: No.

Mr. Silverman: Clause 2 deals with -diminished responsibility. It says:
Where a person kills or is a party to the killing of another, he shall not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind (whether arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind or any inherent causes or induced by disease or injury) as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts and omissions in doing or being a party to the killing.

Mr. Paget: He is sentenced for manslaughter.

Mr. Silverman: The Clause says:
A person who but for this section, would be liable … to be convicted of murder shall be liable instead to be convicted of manslaughter.
When he is convicted of manslaughter, he is then not handed over to the Home Office but sentenced to imprisonment and he may be sentenced to imprisonment for life, because that is a possible sentence on conviction for manslaughter. I only make this point because it is quite clear that in this class of case and in some other classes of case we are not really dealing with criminal types at all, but with diseased or defective mentalities of one sort or another where treatment is what is required rather than penalties.

Mr. Paget: I must have made myself very unclear. That is what I was seeking to show. I was saying that in these sort of cases the sentence should be treated as though the man were handed over to the right hon. Gentleman for the protection of society and the curing of the man. It ought not to he treated primarily as punishment. He is only sentenced because he is not responsible for what he did.

Mr. Silverman: I thought that what my hon. and learned Friend was really saying was that in this matter of the review of sentence we had to bear in mind that the purpose of detention was reformative and remedial, and not a penalty. I thought that was what he had in mind. I thought that it was an unnecessarily euphemistic way of referring to it, because the Bill does not contain any provision for any form of remedial treatment at all. All that it legislates for is the ordinary penal consequence which would follow upon the conviction in any circumstances.
The Under-Secretary obviously has gone to a great deal of trouble to ascertain what the actual practice is and I suppose that we have benefited by his researches. We have also his statement that he has also benefited by his researches and seen fit to modify some unofficial views which he expressed in the course of the Bill last year. All the same, I agree with my hon. and learned Friend that, in spite of the one case in which there might be technical difficulties, the Amendment ought to be accepted, even if, at a later stage, it has to be redrafted


to deal with any particular difficulty in a particular class of case.
If it is the practice of the Home Office to act in this way, then it seems to me that this is an admirable opportunity for defining what is the statutory duty, because I have not satisfied myself that the present practice is such as to relieve us of very reasonable anxiety about the way in which these cases are handled.
I had some correspondence with the ex-Home Secretary about a man who wrote to me from Dartmoor. This was a man who had been convicted in the Channel Islands of the murder of his 12year-old daughter. I know nothing of the circumstances, and it is perhaps unnecessary for this purpose to know anything of the circumstances, because the Home Secretary of the day thought that it was a fit case for reprieve. The man was, in fact reprieved and a sentence of life imprisonment was substituted for the capital sentence. Because, apparently there was no place on the Channel Islands fit for his detention he was removed to Dartmoor. At Dartmoor, by all accounts, he was, throughout the whole period, a model prisoner, never in difficulty and never any source of trouble to anyone.
One can only imagine that in all the circumstances it must have been a particularly pathetic case, not the case of a normally violent man. After a long correspondence with the then Home Secretary, the decision was made that the man was to he released. If that decision is followed, he will 'be released this coming June or July. By that time he will have been in Dartmoor for twenty years. At the time he wrote to me he had been in Dartmoor for nineteen years, and when I wrote to the then Home Secretary I received the reply that his case had been reviewed from time to time but that, for reasons unstated, it had not been thought tit to release him.
In further correspondence I was told that the case was then under further review, and at the end of the correspondence I was told that he would be released next July—I believe it was—and that in view of his long incarceration he had been given longer notice of his intended release so as to accustom his mind to the new circumstances. Twenty years is a long time. I asked the then Home Secretary whether he would tell me what were the

reasons which necessitated detaining this man for so long a period in such a prison.
Dartmoor is not the best of our prisons. Conditions there are not the easiest. I do not know anyone with any knowledge of the circumstances who can feel very proud of it as a British institution or an example of the humanity with which we treat people who have incurred such a
punishment. Dartmoor is a very old prison. It has virtually no amenities. I believe that it was built during the Napoleonic wars, to house French prisoners of war. It has never been modernised in any way. It is the place to which we send the most violent and hardened of people. In view of the most eloquent speeches made by the retentionists during previous debates, saying how wrong it was to detain people for very long periods in circumstances of this kind, and how much more merciful it would be to execute them one wonders whether the Home Secretary of the day intended the reprieve to be a mercy or an added penalty.
At any rate, I asked the Home Secretary whether he would tell me what the reasons were, and he said that it was not the practice to state what the reasons were. That did not seem a very convincing answer. The fact that a thing is not the practice does not necessarily amount to convincing proof that it ought not to be the practice, or that it ought not to be done in exceptional circumstances. I pressed him for the reasons, but I do not know now what they were, because the then Home Secretary refused to throw any light upon the subject.
The Under-Secretary has been considering the practice, and he devoted part of his speech to dealing with what he said were the principles upon which reviews took place, but he did not tell us what those principles were. If they are principles which make it possible to detain a reprieved murderer of unexceptional behaviour as a prisoner in a place like Dartmoor for twenty years, it seems that those principles ought to be publicly stated, publicly discussed and publicly justified, especially if we are now going to-say that we shall apply those principles to people to whom, under the former law, they would not have been applicable.

Mr. David Weitzman (Stoke Newington and Hackney, North): I am very much


in agreement with the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) that principles ought to be stated. However, as I understand, the proposed new Clause deals not with principles but with the duties and powers of the Secretary of State. I am rather worried about the possible effect of the Clause. Its object, I believe, is to remedy the present state of affairs in which, in the case of a fixed term of imprisonment as a penalty for manslaughter, a periodic review does not take place as it does when a life sentence is imposed.
I gather that the duties and powers of the Secretary of State in this matter are not laid down in the statutes; they are merely practices which have come into being over the years. At any rate, we have not been referred to any Statute which shows that this or that ought to be done. In that case, what is there to stop the present practice being altered in any way? Why cannot the Minister recognise that a case has been made out for periodic reviews to take place in cases where sentences of fixed terms of imprisonment have been imposed for manslaughter? I should have thought that there would be no need for a Clause of this kind if a promise were given that this matter would be considered and that in proper cases action would be taken in the manner desired.

4.45 p.m.

Mr. Simon: I should like, first, to reply to the hon. and learned Member for Stoke Newington and Hackney, North (Mr. Weitzman). The statutory powers in this case are those about which I told the Committee earlier. The administrative practice, which is something different, is as I also stated. We feel that it would be undesirable to stereotype that administrative practice by giving it statutory form. The proper method of control lies in the responsibility of the Secretary of State to the House, which can control his administrative practice in the ways that are open to it. It is because one of the effects of the Amendment would be to stereotype administrative practice that we feel that it is undesirable.

Mr. Paget: Why?

Mr. Simon: The hon. and learned Member asks why. It is because the Amendment says:

The duties and powers of the Secretary of State for the Home Department as to the periodic reconsideration and review"—
of life sentences, in effect—
shall be exercised in like manner in relation to all sentences passed upon a person originally charged with murder or with capital murder.

Mr. Paget: How is that stereotyped? The review of life sentences and the action taken upon them are matters entirely within the Home Secretary's discretion. Some people serving life sentences are allowed out on licence within as short a period as six months. I remember that a prisoner concerned in one case in which I took part was let out after four years. The circumstances vary over the whole range of the crime. Why do we not say that a completely unstereotyped arrangement in which discretion is unfettered shall apply to cases where a fixed term of imprisonment has been imposed as well as to cases where a sentence of life imprisonment has been imposed? How are we making it stereotyped? I should say that we are doing exactly the opposite.

Mr. Simon: I was going to deal with that point. I have a note of it and I shall come back to it.
A clear distinction ought to be made between the statutory powers laid down in statutes already existing—one of which was sponsored by the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede)—and the administrative practice, which should be infinitely variable; which should vary from time to time in different circumstances, and the control over which is exercised from time to time by the House.

Mr. Ede: The first four words of the proposed new Clause are, "The duties and powers". The hon. and learned Gentleman merely referred to the powers. Are there any statutory duties—that is, duties imposed by Parliament—upon the Home Secretary with regard to the review of these cases?

Mr. Simon: So far as I know there is no statutory duty to review, but it arises necessarily out of the powers given to the Home Secretary to release a person in certain circumstances. It is quite true that in the case of long sentences of fixed terms of imprisonment there is no duty to review; it is purely an administrative practice. As I said, my right hon. Friend intends to continue to review long fixed


terms in the same way as he reviews life sentences. In that case the duty arises out of the power given to the Home Secretary to licence. It seems to me to be necessarily implicit in that power.

Mr. Ede: It is really a moral duty to exercise the power given to him. It is some years now since I had to refer to this matter, but my recollection is that there is no statutory duty imposed on him, and that it is very much a matter for his discretion. I was wondering whether the Clause would be more acceptable if the words "duties and" were omitted.

Mr. Simon: The right hon. and learned Gentleman is correct when he says that there is no statutory duty. When he says that it is a moral duty, I suppose that that is right, in the sense of it being a political duty, and in the sense that if he fails in his moral duty this House would see to it that he was answerable.

Mr. Ede: This House might say, "You have been given this discretion; you have failed to use it in a case where it should have been used." I do not put it higher than that.

Mr. Simon: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, who has put the matter with complete accuracy.
I come now to the main point made by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) and the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman). They dealt with the particular case of the diseased or defective mentality, and said that is a case for remedial treatment rather than punishment. Even within the sphere of diminished responsibility, the very nature of the term recognises that there is some criminal responsibility. As the Committee knows, I always urged this mitigation of the course of the law and as a back bencher I was greatly pleased when it was included in this Bill. But, although there is not full criminal responsibility, it is implicit that there is sufficient responsibility for the accused man to be answerable in a penal sense.
We should be cautious about how far remedial treatment is likely to be successful in this case. Hon. Members will recall the evidence given to the Royal Commission, and approved by it, suggesting

that in a large majority of cases of psychopaths there is unlikely to be a prospect of a cure. Hon. Gentlemen will remember that in their last two Reports, the Prison Commissioners referred to the new prison being built at Grendon Underwood especially for the treatment of psychopaths. Although that will deal with only a small number of cases, one hopes that it will offer some prospect of remedial treatment for cases to which the hon. Gentleman referred.
It seems to me that this Amendment goes very much further than the cases which the hon. Gentlemen have in mind. It is by no means confined to cases of diminished responsibility; it would refer to all cases, for example, in Part I of the Bill. It would cover cases of provocation, of suicide pacts and what I might call the ordinary traditional type of manslaughter, where there is a failure to prove specific intent to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm. It would also include cases of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm. It is unacceptable in this type of case because once the court thought fit not to pass a sentence of life imprisonment it would give the power to review, to release on licence, to my right hon. Friend. If, in its discretion, the court imposes a sentence of a fixed term of years, it is unacceptable to say that the Executive shall act as a court of appeal—because that is what it amounts to—from the sentence of the court. In my submission, that is constitutionally quite unacceptable.

Mr. Paget: As I understand, the hon. and learned Gentleman now agrees that there are cases—and particularly I think that this will apply to diminished responsibility cases—in which a man is put into a worse position because of this Bill, if, apart from this Bill, he would be sentenced to death. In cases of diminished responsibility there would be commutation and he would then be eligible for licence as soon as the Home Secretary thought it safe to let him out. Now, instead of being sentenced to life imprisonment, he may be sentenced to a term of years by a judge who does not approve of any of the new-fangled nonsense about treating criminals as though they were ill. He may be sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment for the express purpose of cutting out the discretion of the Home Secretary. Surely that is not right.
All we are saying is that where a man is charged with murder and, but for this Bill—this is what the new Clause says—he would have been convicted of murder and a death sentence commuted to a life sentence; where, but for this Bill, the Home Secretary would have had the power and, not the technical duty, but the political and moral duty to review his sentence, the right hon. Gentleman shall still have that technical and moral duty, in spite of this Bill. Surely that is just and right. Why is the Home Secretary embarrassed by retaining a power which only this Bill takes away from him?
But for this Bill, all the men who are affected by this Clause would be under a life sentence because of diminished responsibility, provocation and suicide pacts. There may now be a sentence of years, and, if so, we say that, none the less, that should be subject to review and they should be eligible for licensing as was the case before the passing of this Bill) otherwise, they will be in a worse position. What is the objection to that? We have not heard it.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Lord Privy Seal (Mr. R. A. Butler): I do not think this new Clause is necessary. My hon. and learned Friend the Joint Under-Secretary has referred to all the cases. In fact, my powers remain as before, and the issue at stake is the question where there is a fixed term, that is, not life imprisonment. I should like carefully to indicate the powers which, in my opinion, will remain for the Home Secretary from now on, which I do not think will be unsatisfactory to the Committee and which I do not think I can alter.
The powers will be these. Where a person is charged with capital murder, or murder, but convicted of manslaughter or a lesser crime and sentenced to a lesser term than life imprisonment, such sentences will be reviewed, as in the existing circumstances, every four years. There will, in fact—and this is the answer to the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget)—be no power to release on licence. The reason for that has been put clearly by my hon. and learned Friend. It is because the Home Secretary cannot constitute himself a court of appeal as against the courts. My hon. and learned Friend brought out that

issue quite clearly. But a recommendation for a remission of part of the sentence by the exercise of the Royal Prerogative may be justified where there are exceptional circumstances.
I should prefer to leave these powers of the Home Secretary in the case brought to a head, with his usual acuity, by the hon. and learned Member, on the lines that I have just described, rather than accept the Clause, which the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede)— himself a former Home Secretary—thinks goes too far. I have indicated that there is a power, where circumstances justify it, for the use of the Royal Prerogative. I think that that is better than to try to alter the duties and powers of the Home Secretary, as is recommended by the Clause.

5.0 p.m.

Mr. Ede: I recall that some years ago there was a Mr. Hatry, who was sentenced to a long term of penal servitude, as the law then was. After he had served a very considerable part of the sentence, but had not reached the point where automatic remission for good behaviour would have released him, some hon. Members of this House, led by an hon. Member who is still with us—but as I have not had the opportunity of consulting him it would be wrong for me to name him—called a meeting of hon. Members. The meeting was held in one of the Committee Rooms. I was present, having been invited. It was long before I was Home Secretary.
We decided jointly to approach the Home Secretary on the ground that in this particular case, in the light of the way in which public opinion had altered about long sentences during the term for which Mr. Hatry had been in prison, we would request that a recommendation for the use of the Royal Prerogative should be made. The approach was made and the Home Secretary of the day shared our view. He made the appropriate recommendations and Mr. Hatry, whose case I am sure is notorious enough for every hon. Member to recall its circumstances, was released.
I agree with everything that was said by the Under-Secretary of State in his last speech, except his last sentence. We are all indebted to him for the clarity with which he has answered successive points. No Home Secretary worth his salt could


ever accept that he was not entitled to make a recommendation for the use of the Royal Prerogative in the case of a fixed sentence where, in his opinion, the circumstances warranted it.
I would not limit the use of the Prerogative to long sentences. I fear that people outside think that the Home Secretary exercises this right of recommendation only in cases of capital sentence, but I am sure that the present Home Secretary has already had to make a few recommendations for the remission of quite trivial amounts of terms of imprisonment where circumstances have altered or others have arisen so as to make such a recommendation worth while. He may even have exercised it with regard to fines.
I remember when people were convicted of the offence of opening the door of a motor vehicle on the offside. The cases were brought under the Highway Act of 1835, long before motor vehicles were invented. One day the A.A. solictor who was asked to take one of these cases looked up the Section of the Highway Act, 1835, and found that it referred to vehicles in motion. All the cases that had occurred up to that point had been of stationary vehicles. Nobody had looked up the Act, because everybody realised that to open a door on the offside without taking some care was an anti-social act.
As soon as it was discovered that the law had been badly interpreted all the people who had been convicted began to petition me for the exercise of the Royal Prerogative so that they could get back their £2 or whatever it was that they had paid in fines. I used to send up batches of about a dozen at a time and they all got their money back.

Mr. S. Silverman: And was their good name restored?

Mr. Ede: I am not quite sure that it was. I give that as an example to show how wide a range this right covers. I hope that the hon. and learned Gentleman will not feel himself too bound, the next time he replenishes his memory, by the last sentence that he uttered on the last occasion that he addressed us.

Mr. Paget: I would ask the Home Secretary to go a little further. He said that the power to recommend the Royal Prerogative was exercised only in exceptional circumstances. On the long

sentences he said that there was an investigation each four years or sooner if circumstances arose, and that those investigations were definitely from the point of view, "Should we let this man out or not?"
In cases of diminished responsibility, which are an extremely important class of case, would the right hon. Gentleman treat the exercise of the Royal Prerogative not as something for exceptional circumstances but, where the medical reports were good and doctors felt that the person was safe to re-enter society, as something normal to recommend? If the right hon. Gentleman would meet me thus far, I would be satisfied. That is what I am anxious about.

Mr. R. A. Butler: I do not want to make too many ex cathedra statements on the Bill, partly because I have not the experience, for example, of the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede), who held the office of Home Secretary for a considerable time.
Fixed-term sentences are governed by the words I used, "exceptional circumstances," but I am ready to say that the circumstances will have to be examined in future in the light of the terms of the Bill, which, naturally, governs the situation. While not wishing to pinpoint a a particular case before I have had a chance of examining its circumstances, I think that hon. Gentlemen can feel satisfied that the circumstances contemplated in the Clause are already met, as enlarged by the statements which I have made. My advisers so advised me when we came to this point.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: As the discussion has gone to and fro I have found myself in some embarrassment. I was greatly reassured by the first contribution of the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Middlesbrough, West (Mr. Simon), but less reassured by his second statement; then I was reassured again by the two statements from the Home Secretary. I have been a little bit perturbed, because I felt that my hon. Friends were not quite so reassured as I was.
It might be unfair to the Home Secretary to press him to go further than he has done. We might benefit if we had time to reflect upon the statements which have been made from the Government Front Bench. I am anxious that the


proposed new Clause should not be negatived. Perhaps the wisest course would be for me to withdraw it so that we might consider it in the light of what has been said, and either make representations to the right hon. Gentleman on the subject or have the matter raised in another place. In the circumstances, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion, and Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause.—(NEW EVIDENCE.)

A person convicted of murder or of capital murder shall, on proof that new evidence has become available to him which was not reasonably available to him at the time of his trial, tending to establish his innocence of the crime for which he was convicted or that in all the circumstances there is reason to apprehend that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred, be entitled to apply to the Court of Criminal Appeal for an order for a new trial, and if the Court is satisfied that such new evidence might, if placed before the trial jury, have affected their verdict they shall order a new trial of the case.—[Mr. Hale.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Hale: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
I should like to say to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) that I am glad to be moving this Motion, because these are matters on which I have spent a very great deal of time, and that these are matters of profound importance. May I explain the new Clause quite briefly? I do not propose to spend any time discussing whether the drafting of the Clause itself meets the need precisely.
I beg of the Joint Under-Secretary not to use any of the time of the Committee by replying that such powers now exist. He knows perfectly well, and I know perfectly well, that although it is technically possible for the Court of Criminal Appeal to extend the time for the hearing of any appeal, although it is possible for the Court of Criminal Appeal to exercise its appellate jurisdiction within the limit permitted for hearing new evidence and so on, in fact it is done only in a very limited class of case laid down by the court, which is well understood, and it is really only in cases where, within the normal time allowed for the appeal, certain new facts have been raised or have come to the notice of the defence, which

the defence could show that they could not have ascertained by inquiries at the time of the original inquiry.
What I am suggesting in this new Clause, and what I ask the Committee to consider, is that we should adopt a proposal which has been adopted for centuries in many other countries, and which has worked admirably in many other countries. It is that we should charge the Supreme Court of our normal criminal jurisdiction—we all know that there are technically opportunities for appeal on the law to the House of Lords in criminal cases in certain conditions, but the Court of Appeal is normally the supreme court in criminal jurisdiction—that we should charge that Court with the power, in cases where it appears that a grave miscarriage of justice has occurred, or in cases where it appears that evidence was not brought before the jury which might have been brought before the jury, or where new facts have arisen which throw a new light on the matter, of rehearing or reconsidering the whole matter and making it clear not only that we desire that justice shall be done but that justice shall appear to be done.
I do not often speak dogmatically, but on one or two points here I will speak dogmatically. It is not in the interests of justice to make errors or to conceal errors, and private inquiries ordered by the Home Office, in which distinguished lawyers are empowered to make private investigations and take private testimony, will never satisfy the public conscience. However distinguished, however honourable, however sincerely that investigation is conducted, the public will still say that the man was tried in the light of day, but that the investigation has taken place in the dark, and without the accused being afforded full opportunities for representation.

5.15 p.m.

I say it is important that we should acknowledge that. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget), in the course of some very interesting observations a day or two ago, referred to the question of certainty, which is an extremely important question. It is a question on which very rarely has much attention been displayed. We rather accept as one of the inevitable traditions of our judicial system that


errors rarely occur. We accept that the jury system is the best possible system, and I myself would not like to see it go, but we ought to pay very much more attention to this question of certainty, this question of the degree of proof, of the point at which evidence becomes important or convincing.

In most of the cases which have excited the attention of the public—most of the murder cases of the last century—where women have been charged with poisoning their husbands or husbands have been charged with poisoning their wives, the greatest attention has been directed to the question whether a murder has been committed at all. The issue before the jury has rarely been, "Did Mrs. Jones murder Jones?" It has almost always been, "Was Jones murdered?" Really important questions have been answered by decisive witnesses, such as the little man who conies before the court as the scientific expert witness.

If we are to consider this possibility of error, I would remind the Committee that my hon. and learned Friend, in the same speech to which I have referred, mentioned the Seddon case. He pointed out, as has also been pointed out by the distinguished editor of "British Trials" —Filson Young—that in that case two people were charged on the same evidence with the same offence. If there was the slightest difference in degree in the offence—and I have taken the trouble to read up the case after my hon. and learned Friend referred to it in his speech —the evidence was rather stronger against Mrs. Seddon, but there is no question what the jury did. They said, "There is a doubt in this case. We do not want to convict both, so we will hang one of them," and they hanged the man. The judge indicated in his summing up that that was the sort of thing they could decide to do. It was very unpleasant for him to have to sentence a woman to death. Though when he found out Seddon was a Freemason, as was also the judge, he was very much moved.

The very important observations of my hon. and learned Friend led to the consideration of another matter. It really is true, not merely of the Seddon case, but if we take all the arsenical poisoning cases over the century and analyse them, that the experts said a different thing

every time. At one time, they were saying that chronic arsenical poisoning was a progressive poison, gathering its effect, while at others they are telling us that it is one of the most rapidly evacuated poisons from the body. Some experts said that if a lethal dose is administered, at one time it is effective in 48 hours, while others have said that it takes six or seven days. Yet the experts speak the words of oracles and their views are accepted as dogma.

Of course judges say, "Here is this distinguished Home Office expert. Here is this toxicologist, who acts for the Home Office. He must be a man of absolutely no prejudice. Why should he have any prejudice? He was asked to examine this matter on behalf of the Crown, and he came to it as an expert free from bias. You should have regard to what he says."

Once a Sir Bernard Spilsbury had gone into the witness box and given his evidence as to what he thought the postmortem examination of a body disclosed there was no one who could be put into the witness box to contradict him. One knew precisely what happened, and the specialists knew what happened. London was searched for an expert who was paid very large fees. The first questions put by counsel for the Crown to a witness contesting that evidence were: "Do you know how many postmortem examinations Sir Bernard Spilsbury has conducted? Do you know how often Sir Bernard Spilsbury has been called upon to seek arsenic in a body? How many times have you done it? How many examinations have you made?" There could be no answer, for there could never be put into the witness box in a criminal trial an expert who had anything like that experience.

Of course, defending solicitors often tried to do it. I described in some previous observations what we used to do when we could afford it and had the money to do so. To be fair to the gentleman concerned he may be still living—he was never avaricious in his fees.

Mr. Paget: He is not still living; he committed suicide.

Mr. Hale: Professor Glaister used to come from north of the Border to give evidence and it was very surprising that he always disagreed with Sir Bernard Spilsbury. It was also a very remarkable


thing that Sir Bernard used to go north of the Border and disagree with Professor Glaister. The same has happened with every couple of expert witnesses throughout the centuries. When Sir Albert Swaine Taylor used to go into the witness box the College of Surgeons used to say that he did not understand Marsh's test. We have had this disagreement on almost every occasion when there has been two expert witnesses. One of the most famous cases was when Spencer Cowper, grandfather of the poet, who became a judge of the High Court, was charged with murder. He stood in the dock and called his brother, who became a Lord Chancellor, to give evidence as to character.
He was charged with the murder of a lady who clearly had committed suicide. The reason he nearly hanged for murder was that the experts said she must have been dead before her body was put into the water as the body was found floating. We now know that all that was quite wrong. We know that the lady was found floating because she was wearing wide skirts, which kept her up in the water, as they had a slightly parachuting effect, but Spencer Cooper nearly hanged and we nearly lost a tolerably good judge and an excellent poet as a result.
It is nonsense to say that miscarriages of justice cannot occur and do not occur. I think our judicial system is a very fine system. It is the admiration and envy of many other countries. I have a great regard for it and for its administration, but it is no defence—it is a foolish defence —of any system which is essentially a system in which the final determination has to be made by twelve men in a box, not experts. not full of knowledge, applying their minds and applying the test of what the ordinary man in certain circumstances would do, to say that they cannot make a mistake. It is impossible to say that they cannot go wrong; of course they can go wrong. It is almost a defence of the system to admit that they can go wrong. Once we admit it, we ought to be jealous of the duty of seeing that so far as possible errors are corrected.
In the case of William Gardiner, who was tried twice on precisely the same evidence in what was known as the "Peasenhall" murder case, the jury disagreed on two occasions. On each occa-

sion he was defended by Sir Ernest Wilde and prosecuted by Sir Henry Dickens, and on each occasion the evidence was the same. At the first hearing, the jury were eleven to one for a conviction, and at the second hearing the jury were eleven to one for an acquittal. In those circumstances how can one say that there is no possibility of error? Had the one man been a little less firm on the first occasion, Gardiner would have hanged. Had the one man been a little less firm on the second occasion he would have been completely free. He was in fact freed by nolle prosequi.
The records of our criminal courts contain many cases of error. My hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) called attention a few days ago to the case of Rowlands and spoke about it very informatively. In many ways the case of Rowlands was a classic case for an inquiry. I hope my hon. Friend will deal with that case in the course of this discussion. There is also the case of Evans, about which my hon. Friend and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton have both written very movingly. I leave it to them, if they wish, to refer to that case. Does anyone suggest that the inquiry by the Home Office about the Evans case has cleared the public mind of anxiety? Does anyone really suggest that the public were completely reassured by the report given as a result of that inquiry? I find more difficulty in understanding how anyone can be reassured about the Evans case than I do about almost any contested case.
The history of France in this matter is perhaps a simpler history to deal with on the question of miscarriage of justice. The Cour de Cassation plays a similar rôle to our Court of Criminal Appeal, but it is empowered, and has been empowered for many years, with the right of retrial, the right to declare a man innocent, to award compensation, and even to declare the innocence of a man long since dead and to award declarations of innocence in the public papers. Most of us concerned with this matter, if we went across the Channel to look for examples, would recall the most moving of all the cases of miscarriage of justice, the case of Jean Calas in the early 18th century. There a Protestant family in a Catholic country—Huguenots


subject to the same disabilities as those to which Irish Catholics were subject by Protestants at the same time—went to the House of Peers in France for a rehearing and a reconsideration from the Catholic Peers of France after years of struggle and years of hostility.
The question whether the public mind is concerned about these matters can be answered by the fact that there is in existence a bibliography of the Jean Calas case. Well over one hundred volumes had been printed about it at the time that the bibliography was published some twenty years ago and more have been written since, including a book by a former Lord Chancellor, Lord Maugham. As sometimes happens—as happened in this House on 4th August, 1914—in a state of emergency we enact a great deal of legislation. The power of rehearing was repealed in France during the years of the Revolution. During the years of the Revolution, there was the case, in 1793, of Joseph Lesurques and the Lyons Mail, loaded with assiqnats—

The Temporary Chairman (Sir Norman Hulbert): I think the hon. Member might at least keep to British trials.

Mr. Hale: I did not hear what you said and I am completely unable to understand, Sir Norman.

The Temporary Chairman: I said that if the hon. Member is going to cite cases he might cite cases which are British. Then we shall get on better.

Mr. Hale: Would it not be a good idea, Sir Norman, to find what I am going to say before objecting to what I have not said? You might put me on the wrong course. I submit that I may talk about miscarriages of justice and give examples in reference to a proposed new Clause which says that something should be done to deal with miscarriages of justice.

5.30 p.m.

Mr. Paget: Further to the point of order, Sir Norman. Surely my hon. Friend may refer to how miscarriages of justice are dealt with in a country where the Clause that we are proposing applies.

Mr. Hale: I intend in the course of my speech, Sir Norman, to make reference to some miscarriages of justice. I do not

know how one can refer to a miscarriage of justice without saying how it was a miscarriage of justice, or how one can convince the Committee that one should try to take some steps to deal with miscarriages of justice unless one suggests that they have occurred. That is what I had in mind in approaching the problem.
The case of Lesurques was one which excited not merely France for half a century but England as well. It was one which Sir Henry Irving dramatised, and his son wrote brilliantly about it. It is a famous case, and was recently the subject of a full-length book in English by Sir Charles Oman. A set of circumstances occurred there which have not occurred in other cases of miscarriage of justice. The facts were in a very limited compass, and they were hardly in dispute.
Four horsemen had been seen wandering along the road which the Lyons mail would take on its journey with assignats for the pay of Napoleon's troops in Italy. The four horsemen were seen calling at various cafes. They were seen apparently hanging about for the mail to come along. One witness spoke of their inquiring about the mail. It was due to leave Paris in the afternoon, at what we should call teatime, and it had upon it the postilion, the manager of the mail—a man who had bought his appointment—and a single passenger. At dawn next morning the mail was found robbed on a little side road. One of the horses was missing, obviously having been ridden away by the mysterious passenger, who was an accomplice. The postilion and the manager of the mail had been murdered, and their bodies were found lying by the roadside.
The French police commenced their inquiries with a view to arresting the five men involved. They brought Lesurques and others to trial, and he was convicted, probably by the unhappy accident of an alteration in a day-book, produced in support of a strong alibi. I should have thought that day-books were made to be altered and that they were full of alterations. Lesurques was taken to the scaffold protesting his innocence and was executed. The man who was convicted with him—he was guilty—declared from the dock that Lesurques was innocent and repeated it on the scaffold. As the years went by more victims came in. Four or five people were hanged for the


offence. Altogether eight persons were found guilty of a crime which was committed by five.
I referred earlier to what happened to the power of the Cour de Cassation as a result of the Revolution. There grew up, not only from the family of Lesurques but from a body of men of good will who believed in justice, a demand for a revision. The demand went to the French Parliament, and eventually the Chamber of Deputies restored the confiscated estates and made financial provision for the widows, in that way trying to admit that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. Yet it was not until the 1870's, 80 years after the mail had made its journey, that the French Parliament was prevailed upon to empower the Cour de Cassation to have precisely the powers which I suggest that our Court of Criminal Appeal should have.
When the case of Lesurques came up for review, the Cour de Cassation decided against revision. It decided that although there was evidence that something had gone wrong, there was not enough evidence after all those years to say what it was that had gone wrong.
The second case dealt with by the Cour de Cassation is very little known, but it is very moving. It was the case of Baffer and Louarn. They were poor and friendliness men, and they were convicted of burglary with violence and robbery with violence. They were convicted on evidence which was very convincing. They were convicted on expert evidence which was not disputed. A year or two later when the real culprits were arrested and found guilty, the innocent Baffer and Louarn had both died in prison, one in the penal settlement of Cayenne, the other in the convict prison at Home.
There was no one to raise the case of Baffer and Louarn. There was no relative left to say "You cannot give us back their lives and all that we have been deprived of, but at least give those men a decent memory and the right to rest peacefully in their graves." There was no one who could initiate proceedings. No one had the right to bring the matter before the court. However, in pursuance of its powers, the Cour de Cassation said, "We have knowledge that this matter should be investigated." The issue was retried and the innocence of the men

was declared. A notice was published all over the land proclaiming their innocence.
What is the result of this? I ask the Committee to consider for two minutes what the result is. The result is an increased respect for the administration of justice. One does not impugn the authority of one's judiciary by saying that it can err. The Court of Appeal says very rude things about King's Bench judges every day, sometimes in terms which would be regarded here as unparliamentary. Time after time judges lay down the law in one court and have it re-laid in another. No one loses any of the faith he may have in our judiciary merely because it is capable of error. It is, indeed, a principle of our law that in the courts of justice errors are possible. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton has properly called attention to this. It is the principle of our law that one does not find a man guilty because he has committed a crime. One finds him guilty because he has been discovered in such circumstances that the reasonable conclusion is that he committed a crime.
That is no mere rhetorical or debating point. Let us imagine a young gentleman who takes a young lady down to a flat at Eastbourne. Perhaps for the moment I had better shift along the coast, although it was at Eastbourne that an ancient case occurred. Let us say that the young man takes the lady to some remote seaside cottage. No one knows what has happened, but we say, perfectly fairly, "If you take the trouble to cut up the body and bury it, it is no use coming along afterwards and saying that the lady accidentally fell and hit her head on a bucket." If over 50 years we have 100 cases, it is probable that one innocent person will have been hanged and that 99 guilty persons will have been hanged. We might say to Dr. Crippen, "Perhaps you did not poison your wife, and perhaps you administered poison for another purpose, but once you buried your wife in the cellar and bolted to America, you took a grave risk of hanging."
In certain circumstances, one is more or less impelled by the gravity of the surrounding acts to say, "We cannot know, and do not know what occurred, but these are circumstances such that if a verdict of guilty were not recorded the


community would not be safe." It is what happens in every such case, and I think that it is important that it should happen. That being so, it is, of course, of very great importance that there should be some constant possibility of review.
I now come to another aspect. It is not generally understood, and never is generally understood by the public, that there is no appellate criminal jurisdiction in this country in the sense that no court normally has any power to rehear evidence, except under certain very special circumstances. There is no power of review. It is important that we should know that. Juries are sometimes criticised by judges, who sometimes openly express disagreement with the decisions of juries, but, once a jury has returned a verdict of guilty, there is virtually no appeal at all against that finding.
I know, of course—we all know—of the Wallace case, in which the Court of Criminal Appeal, in exercise of its very limited powers said, "This finding was so perverse, so unsupported by evidence that we are going to exercise a power we have never before exercised in a murder case, and order the release of Mr. Wallace."

Mr. Scholefield Allen: I think that in that case the Court of Criminal Appeal went further than my hon. Friend says. It said, in fact, that there was no evidence of any kind whatsoever upon which twelve men and women could come to the conclusion that the man was guilty. It was suspicion, and suspicion only.

Mr. Hale: I am grateful, of course, for that intervention. I thought it was as I was saying, but my hon. and learned Friend put it more clearly and as he was a learned counsel in the trial nobody has a better right to intervene and tell us what happened. There was no evidence, yet the jury found Wallace guilty and—my hon. and learned Friend can correct me—found him guilty after a very short retirement, almost immediately.

Mr. Paget: And in defiance of the direction of the judge.

Mr. Hale: And in defiance of the direction of the judge. It was not a very good or clear direction, but it certainly came down, towards the end of the summing up, to an expression of very considerable doubt. I remember that Sir Edward Marshall Hall said of one or two cases

in which the judge finally swung in favour of the prisoner, that he, Sir Edward, had got the man off, but that the judge wanted the credit.
Should we extend the powers of criminal appeal? I am sure, Sir Norman, that you would say that it was out of order to pursue that, both under the Clause and under the Bill, but, short of that alternative, which is a matter for long Parliamentary discussion and consideration, I suggest that this Clause does put before the Committee a simple opportunity of providing a simple procedure. If we are to let an appellate court have a right of rehearing at all, what more appropriate court than the Court of Criminal Appeal, already exercising a limited appellate jurisdiction?
If we are to give the court that right, then I have suggested that, if there is to be a full rehearing, it could be ordered by the Court of Criminal Appeal to take place before a court of first instance. But, in any event, that is largely a technical point. So long as there is some tribunal of Her Majesty's judges in which the public has confidence and which can have this right then, speaking for myself, I care little about the precise or detailed way in which the right is exercised, but it is important.
In the concluding few moments of this speech, let me just go back to a recollection of what has happened in the last half century. In the case of Timothy John Evans there was an inquiry. There was a recent case in which the right hon. and gallant Gentleman the former Home Secretary intervened, and cancelled the sentence. It was a case which involved so much violence that it might have resulted in death and in which, I think, the evidence left no doubt in the mind of the jury.
5.45 p.m.
Anyone who cares to refer to the biographies of great advocates will find that, allowing even for the necessary partisanship which involves an advocate, there was case after case in which the advocates themselves had no idea what the verdict would be at the moment when the jury returned; and case after case in which advocates were convinced that the verdict given was not that which ought to have been given. It is said that Sir Charles Russell never expressed a view of


the innocence of Mrs. Maybrick, but he very often expressed the view that she should never have been convicted, which comes nearly to the same thing. In many cases there were grave doubts in the minds of the spectators.
One recollects the case of Oscar Slater, the story of which has never yet been fully told, the facts of which have been suppressed—and the police officer who had the guts and the courage to try to bring the facts to light was broken and sacked. That was a scandal which in some ways involved high places and approached the disreputability of the case against Dreyfus. Oscar Slater's was a case which was finally the subject of a retrial under an Act passed specially for that purpose, precisely because this Clause did not exist. It was found that if there was to be a rehearing of the case, a special Act of Parliament was necessary to make it possible, and that special Act was passed.
One could hardly quote a more obvious example in support of the necessity of this Clause, because if similar situations arose again we would have to pass a special Act in each case. The Joint Under-Secretary will recall that it was the intervention of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which led to the reinvestigation of the Slater case. That was not the only case that came to the notice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There was the even more astounding case of George Edalji, to which I want to allude.
Edalji was the son of a Parsee Church of England Minister who was the rector of, I think, Rugeley, or of a village near Rugeley. He was a young solicitor. He was charged with maiming cattle, and also with sending abusive letters, some of which abused his father, his family, his relations, and so on. The man who wrote the abusive letters had an extraordinary admiration for the local police.
Edalji was brought to trial. Practically no record was kept of the evidence. When it became a question of looking up the trial one could hardly find adequate records of the evidence against him. He was brought before quarter sessions and sentenced, I think, to seven years' imprisonment—certainly not less than five. He was, of course, struck off the roll of solicitors. There was not any evidence against him.
In the case of Edalji, the police had watched the house at night to see if he went out. They had not seen him go out, yet that was not recorded as a circumstance in his favour. They had seen nobody leave the house. He was so shortsighted, he suffered from such chronic myopia, that he could not have seen an elephant, never mind the hoof of a horse or a cow—whatever the animal was.
Edalji was a reserved, retrospective young solicitor, practising in Birmingham and writing books on railway law. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case, and I must say that it is to the credit of the Daily Telegraph that it put at Sir Arthur's disposal practically two central pages for him to say what he thought about that case.
What happened in that case? A Select Committee of this House considered the matter. In the Edalji case we had evidence from handwriting experts. The same people who gave false evidence against Adolph Beck gave false evidence against Edalji and identified the handwriting. The Select Committee, sitting after Edalji had served his sentence, reported that he was innocent of the crime of cattle maiming, but they thought that he had written the anonymous letters. They left him with his character really unredeemed, because they reported that he had contributed by his folly to his own conviction and that he had written these letters which disturbed the neighbourhood.
I remember that a quarter of a century later a man was brought up at Rugeley police court and convicted of writing anonymous letters. The police said—it was not much publicised at the time—that they were now satisfied that this was the man who had written the letters in a case of great fame which had occurred a quarter of a century ago. The name of Edalji was not mentioned, but it was clearly indicated. The Select Committee who left him with the slur of writing the letters were wrong, just as the jury were wrong in finding him guilty in the first place, and Conan Doyle was vindicated. There was no evidence that Edalji had written the letters. There was not the slightest motive for his having written the letters. Only a chief constable who had lied several times in the matter and the prejudice against the Parsee brought about his conviction.
It is no use saying that these things cannot happen now. I have seen prejudice occur. Anyone who practised in the courts in 1926 will know that there can be times when there is a great deal more prejudice than justice about. Of course, anyone who represents respectable people of enemy alien nationality in time of war knows the extent to which prejudice can be introduced into courts. We have seen it happen. It is no use anyone on the other side of the Committee saying that this cannot be so. I beg the Attorney-General to say that he will take this Clause under his wing, even if it means a Report stage, now that we have this opportunity to right a wrong. In conclusion, I should like to apologise for a discourtesy to my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne when I rose to speak.

Mr. S. Silverman: The Committee has been treated by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale) to a fascinating review of a long series of established miscarriages of justice both here and abroad, and I rejoice that I did not for more than a moment stand between him and the Committee in his doing so. However, perhaps he will add to this long and distinguished record of miscarriages of justice one minor one, and that is connected with the new evidence in a documentary form.

Mr. John Paton: Why not share it with the Committee?

Mr. Silverman: It is a secret of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West. He can refer to it himself if he wishes to do so.
The point to which I wish to draw the Committee's attention in supporting the proposed new Clause is the precise manner in which the Clause seeks to introduce new safeguards against the persistence of miscarriages of justice when new evidence teas been discovered in time. What the Clause does is to give to the Court of Criminal Appeal in certain exceptional cases a power which it does not at present possess, that is to say, the power to order a new trial. Those of us who took part in the Committee stage of the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, will remember a very long controversy that took place there on the question of whether the Court of Criminal Appeal should or

should not be given the power to order a retrial in a case where a conviction which was appealed against could not, in its opinion, be supported. I opposed giving the Court of Criminal Appeal that power, and the Committee, and subsequently the House also, were of that opinion, and the Court of Criminal Appeal was refused the power.
In most cases, and on principle, I remain of that opinion today. I think that if a conviction has been obtained and if, on appeal, the Court of Criminal Appeal is satisfied that the conviction cannot be maintained, the proper course is to quash the conviction and acquit the accused instead of submitting him a second time to the ordeal of a trial, not merely because it is unfair to the man, but because in those circumstances a second trial which shall be a fair trial is virtually impossible. I do not want to dilate upon that further, because this is not the occasion for it. I only mention it in order to show why, in the particular circumstances of this Clause, I think that the Court of Criminal Appeal might well have such a power.
I know that the Committee has listened to a number of cases. I want to illustrate my argument by reference to one more case. Sometimes it is very much easier to see the bearing of an argument of this kind in relation to the known and accepted facts of a particular case than it is in generalisations or arguments about principles. I refer to a case which my hon. Friend has mentioned, but did not dilate upon, the case of Walter Graham Rowland.
In that case a man was convicted in Manchester of the murder of a prostitute on a bombed site. He was convicted largely on the evidence, as I understand, of three people who saw a man at different times whom they had never seen before in different circumstances, and for a few moments only, and who differed fundamentally amongst themselves as to the physical attributes of the man they identified.
6.0 p.m.
The conviction which was obtained was in the highest degree doubtful and unsatisfactory, even as the case stood in the Manchester Assize Court. I should have thought that no professional man reading the transcript now could justify or, indeed, understand how any one could


have thought that on that evidence Rowland could possibly be fairly convicted.
That, however, is not the point which is relevant to the discussions now. It happened that after Rowland was convicted and while he was awaiting execution, another man in another prison went to the governor of that prison and said, "I have been reading about the conviction of a man called Rowland for the murder of a prostitute in Manchester on a bombed site. Rowland is not guilty I know he is not guilty, because I committed that murder myself." He said it in a three or four line statement made to the prison governor, who communicated it to the Manchester police and to the legal representatives of Rowland.
There were two independent interviews in the prison. At one of them this man, whose name was Ware, made a statement to Rowland's solicitor, this time a long and circumstantial proof taken with all the care that an experienced solicitor and counsel can display in dealing with matters of the first importance. The other statement, by this time the third statement, was taken by the Manchester police and was itself a long and detailed account giving a full and circumstantial report of the man's movements over all the relevant dates. Armed with that evidence, Rowland's advisers went to the Court of Criminal Appeal and asked for leave to call further evidence.
My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West said that in our criminal appeals there is not a rehearing, there is not a trial, there is not a hearing of evidence. He was perfectly right, except that where an appellant can satisfy the Court of Criminal Appeal on two points, then the Court of Criminal Appeal should and will hear fresh evidence.
The two points on which an appellant has to satisfy the Court of Criminal Appeal before fresh evidence will be admitted and heard are these. First, he has to establish that the evidence is really new in the sense that he did not have it in his possession at the time of the trial and that no reasonable inquiry on his part could have put him in possession of that evidence. In other words, he must show not merely that he did not have the evidence, but that it was no fault of his and no fault of his advisers that the evidence was not originally available.
The second point he has to establish is that this new evidence is such that, had it been heard by the jury together with the other evidence which they did hear, it is reasonable to suppose that it might have had an effect upon the result. In other words, he has to prove, first, that it is new, and second, that it is material. It is, of course, evidence of that kind which is contemplated here and which is indeed referred to in terms in the new Clause. It was that kind of case which my hon. Friend had in mind when, as he told the Committee, he drafted this new Clause and put it down in the hope that it might be considered and accepted.
One would have thought that Rowland was in a position in which he could easily satisfy the Court of Criminal Appeal that he had new evidence in both those senses. He did not know and could not have known about Ware's confession at his trial because Ware had not made it at his trial; it was evidence which was not merely new in that highly technical sense, but it was evidence which came into being for the first time after the trial was over. Further, it is the jury's business to judge the truth or honesty of witnesses and the value of evidence given before them, and it is very difficult indeed to see how anyone could fail to satisfy the Court of Criminal Appeal that, if the jury had had this confession and the man who made it before them, they might possibly or might reasonably have come to another conclusion.
The Court of Criminal Appeal did not contest either that the evidence was fresh evidence or that it was material evidence; but it disallowed the application because it felt another and quite different difficulty. That difficulty, if I understand the judgments delivered, was this. The court said, "If we hear this man Ware and if we come to the conclusion that, if the jury had heard him, they might have acquitted Rowland, we have no power to order a new trial, but we can only acquit Rowland. If we acquit Rowland in those circumstances, that may be held to be tantamount to a conviction of Ware. Therefore, if we allow this application and hear this evidence, and if we allow the appeal and acquit Rowland, then inevitably Ware will be tried, and tried in circumstances in which he cannot have a fair trial if he should then say that his confession was false. Everyone will


say that the Court of Criminal Appeal has acquitted Rowland on Ware's evidence, so how on earth can one say that Ware is not guilty?"
This is not the place to argue with the decisions of the Court of Criminal Appeal. I felt then and I feel now-I have taken some pains to publish the opinion—that the Court of Criminal Appeal was hopelessly wrong and that its decision was quite out of accord with its whole line of criminal appeal decisions on this point. But mark what follows. The Court of Criminal Appeal said there were other methods; the Home Secretary had other: powers open to him which would enable him to do what the Court felt it could not do. The Court did not explain why a conviction of Ware by a Home Office inquiry would be less prejudicial than a decision by the Court of Criminal Appeal. It did not appear to have gone into that matter. Indeed, such a decision would have been much more prejudicial, because all the Court of Criminal Appeal was asked to decide was that the new evidence might, not necessarily would, have produced a different result which would have been less prejudicial to him.
The Home Secretary, acting on that, appointed Mr. John Catterall Jolly, K.C., to conduct an inquiry, and he appointed to act with him a most experienced police officer. If he was an experienced police officer even in those days, he is a much more experienced police officer now: he is now Chief Superintendent Hannam. He was appointed to assist Mr. Jolly in his inquiry. The inquiry was in secret. Neither Rowland nor his counsel was entitled to be present at it in any adequate sense. There was no giving of evidence, leading of evidence or cross-examining of evidence.
We know only this from Mr. Jolly's report. Ware, be it remembered, had three times voluntarily confessed on two of the occasions with the utmost circumstantial detail. Mr. Jolly and Mr. Hannam went to see him and they said in their report: "At first he persisted in his confession, but then withdrew it and made a new statement." There is not a word in the report of what took place between his at first persisting in the confession and then ultimately withdrawing it; we are not told at what interval of time, whether in anybody's presence, under what kind

of questioning, if any kind of questioning, or under what kind of warning, if any kind of warning. Just the things that, as my hon. Friend quite rightly said, would have been brought out in detail at a public trial in the light of day. This inquiry was to take the place of such a trial. This secret withdrawal was to take place in secret without any of the safeguards which publicly confers on the administration of any judicial system.
There followed, however, another very long and circumstantial statement which appeared in the report, the one of which Mr. Jolly said he was satisfied that it was true; and because he was satisfied that that was true, he reported to the Home Secretary that there was no reason whatever to fear that there was any miscarriage of justice in the conviction of Rowland. And yet it required hardly more than a casual reading of that final statement of retraction to ascertain that it could not possibly be true as it was made.
The experienced lawyer, with judicial experience—he was a recorder—and the experienced police officer had overlooked an elementary fact, the elementary fact being that if certain events happened upon Saturday afternoon and evening and there is then a night following upon those events, the morning after is Sunday morning and not Saturday morning. It is as simple as that. On that statement, Rowland was hanged.
I am sorry that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) is not present. He was then Home Secretary. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice) was then Solicitor-General and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Helens (Sir H. Shawcross) was then Attorney-General. When that report came out, I went to see them both, because it seemed to me that the decision of the Court of Criminal Appeal was so out of line with a long line of its own decisions and so wrong and raised a question of such public importance that the Attorney-General ought to grant his fiat to enable that decision to go to the House of Lords.
6.15 p.m.
I failed to persuade them, although my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Newport put up with me for nearly seven hours that day. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Helens put up with the first hour and the last


half hour of it. Perhaps that is why he remained obdurate to the end, whereas my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Newport showed signs of weakening before the argument concluded. I think he was a little shaken, but in the end was overruled by the Attorney-General of the day, and, of course, it was the Attorney-General's fiat which was required and not the Solicitor-General's. However, the fiat was in the end refused. I believe that there was some approach to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields, who said, quite properly, that if a fiat was to be issued, he would grant a reprieve. "If you tell me there is any doubt," he said, "I will give you a reprieve at once, but if you do not tell me either of those things, what can I do?" The man was hanged next morning.
It seems to me that in cases of that kind, if the Court of Criminal Appeal is for any reason to feel itself inhibited from hearing evidence proffered to it, evidence which is new, evidence which is material and evidence on which a man's life—it may be, an innocent man's life—may depend, we must in those special circumstances give the Court of Criminal Appeal the power that it would have if the Clause were accepted.
If the Court does not want to hear the evidence itself, do not let somebody say, "Let the evidence be heard by somebody appointed by the Home Secretary" somebody who is under no obligation to allow anybody else to be present, under no obligation to take evidence on oath, under no obligation to provide opportunities for cross-examination and who will not have the assistance of a jury in deciding the questions of fact which it is proper under our system that the jury and not the court shall decide—but let it go back to a court of first instance, with a judge, with a jury and with the evidence in open court examined and cross-examined and decided upon in the end by the unanimous verdict of twelve jurors.
I confessed at the beginning that I would not seek to make a case for a general power in the Court of Criminal Appeal to order retrials—I do not like it; I do not think it is right, fair, practical or just. But I still say that in cases of this kind, if there are not to be continued miscarriages of justice, we must

give to the Court of Criminal Appeal the power of ordering a new trial.

Mr. Weitzman: The Committee has heard recounted a number of cases where miscarriages of justice have come about. I do not propose to add to the number that have been mentioned to the Committee and I agree very strongly with what my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) said regarding the question of a new trial. I only intervene for one moment to mention what I consider to be a point of substance with regard to this matter.
The Committee will be aware that under the Criminal Appeal Act. 1907, notice of appeal has to be given within ten days, but there is power to make an application to the Court to extend the time for appeal in every case except in the case of a conviction involving sentence of death. That means that in the case of a capital murder where the death sentence has been passed, and even where the sentence has been commuted, if new evidence is discovered after ten days there can be no appeal by the accused person.
I agree that there are, of course, powers with the Home Secretary, but no power exists under the Criminal Appeal Act now for the accused after ten days to make such an appeal. One of the reasons I support the proposed new Clause is that I think it will obviously appear to the Committee to be quite unfair that where a person is condemned to death and where the sentence is commuted and a period of ten days or more has elapsed and new evidence is discovered there should be no power then on the part of the convicted person to appeal against that sentence. I think that is a point of substance, and I desired to put it to the Committee.

Mr. Simon: This new Clause has been moved—I hope it will not be impertinent if I say this—in the sort of terms and spirit which is bound to appeal to the Committee. I hope that all of us in this Chamber are animated by the continual desire to see that justice is done and manifestly seen to be done, particularly those of us who are lawyers and who have enjoyed the intellectual pursuit of the law and the fun of collision in the courts. However, I am sure hon. and learned


Members will bear me out when I say that what makes our job ultimately rewarding is the consciousness that we are, however humble, acolytes in the temple of justice. Therefore, the way in which a case is put is bound to appeal to us.
In addition—and, again, I hope that it will not be thought impertinent if I say this—the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale), who, the other day, gave us a great comic epic, today gave us the benefit of further examples of his great erudition and learning in this branch of the criminal law, and the hon. Gentleman the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman), who has, I know, made a profound study of the Rowland case—I read his publication on it—has given us again an extremely persuasive account of the case.
I am bound to point out, however, that in the Rowland case there would still, as I understand, if this new Clause were accepted, have been the necessity of an extra-judicial inquiry. That was certainly the view of the Departmental Committee on New Trials in Criminal Cases, which reported in 1954 and which expressly referred to the Rowland case. In recommending, in limited circumstances, the power to be given to the Court of Criminal Appeal it said:
In our view, for example, the existence of power to order a new trial would not have made it possible to dispense with the inquiries which were held in the cases of Rowland in 1947 and of Devlin and Burns in 1952.
I do not think that it would be of any value if I were to discuss the case of Rowland in detail. It has been frequently discussed in this Chamber, and, as the hon. Gentleman said, and as one would know, carefully considered at the time by right hon. and learned Gentlemen opposite in whose judgment in these matters we have learned to have great respect, and it would, I think, be impertinent and unprofitable if I were to attempt to reopen that case.
The hon. Gentleman the Member for Nelson and Colne started off by saying that, in principle, he objected to a power to be given to the appellate criminal court to order a new trial; and, of course, this is a matter on which opinion, both legal and lay, is sharply divided. As he reminded the Committee, the Lords, in

1948, amended the Criminal Justice Bill in such a way as to give this power to the appellate criminal court, and the House of Commons disagreed with the Lords in their Amendment. I have read the debates which took place. Weighty reasons were given, by the hon. Member himself and the hon. and learned Member for Nortnampton (Mr. Paget), and my right hon. Friend spoke in the same sense.
Since that time the matter has been referred to the Departmental Committee to which I have referred. It recommended that in certain specific cases there should be a power to order a new trial. In particular, it recommended that
the Court of Criminal Appeal should be empowered to order a new trial of a convicted person where the appeal is based on grounds of fresh evidence.
I shall refer to other recommendations later. It went on, by a majority of five to three, to recommend that
the Court of Criminal Appeal should not be empowered to order a new trial of a convicted person except in cases where the appeal is based on grounds of new evidence.
The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne gave a number of reasons why to a great many people the proposal for a new trial in criminal cases is objectionable. A number of those reasons are set out in the Report of the Departmental Committee, the most important being that it is contrary to the fundamental principle that no man should be put in peril a second time on the same charge; that it would be difficult to ensure a fair trial for the accused on the second occasion; that it would be unfair to the accused person to be put through the ordeal and made to bear the expense of a second trial; and, finally, that it would be difficult to distinguish between those cases in which the power should be exercised and those in which a verdict of acquittal should be substituted.
It is for those reasons that many people, though by no means all, think that the proper decision of the appellate criminal court, which is satisfied that there is sufficient reason to think that there may have been a miscarriage of justice or an error of law, is acquittal rather than a new trial. As I understand, the hon. Gentleman approaches the whole problem from that angle, though many hon. Members, I know, feel that the Court of


Criminal Appeal and the House of Lords should have this power.
The Government have not yet made any pronouncement on the Report of the Departmental Committee. I do not doubt that today's debate will be taken into account, and that the speeches which have been made will be weighed carefully when a decision is come to. Also, I do not doubt that the views which have been put forward will weigh with the Government in deciding whether legislation should be introduced to give effect to the Committee's recommendations.
6.30 p.m.
The Government are unable to accept the new Clause for a number of reasons, some of which are of more weight than others. I will give the minor ones and say right away that I know that hon. Members will say that they are the sort of points that could be put right on Report, but it is my duty to put forward various deficiencies in a new Clause when the Committee is weighing whether it should be passed into law or not.
In the first place, although the Clause is in line with the Departmental Committee's recommendations, it gives no power to the House of Lords to order a new trial, although the Departmental Committee so recommended. Further, it does not give to the Court of Criminal Appeal power to do so where there has been a reference to the Court of Criminal Appeal by the Home Secretary under Section 19 of the Criminal Appeal Act, 1907, although the Departmental Committee so recommended in paragraph 41 of its Report.

Mr. S. Silverman: I am sure that the hon. and learned Gentleman would agree that, so far as the House of Lords is concerned, that would be almost irrelevant to the Clause, because the Clause deals with new trial on the ground solely of new evidence, and no case would go to the House of Lords except on a point of law.

Mr. Simon: That is true, but a point of law may arise on the relevance and admissibility of fresh evidence. I agree, in general, that it would be true that a point of law would be unlikely in such circumstances, but it could arise on a question of admissibility. I have said already that I do not think it would be

helpful if I debated the Rowland case. Since Section 19 of the 1907 Act was passed, four capital cases have been referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal under that provision.
I should like to refer to the points made by the hon. and learned Member for Stoke Newington and Hackney, North (Mr. Weitzman). He points out the restriction on the extension of time for appeal in cases of murder. We all know the reason for that. The hon. and learned Member for Northampton mentioned it the other day. It is that under our system we discountenance the protraction of criminal cases, particularly those where the capital penalty is at issue. That provision remained unamended in the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, and, I think, is consonant with the general feeling of penologists in this country. I think that the answer to the hon. and learned Member is Section 19. In other words, there is power in the Home Secretary, when fresh evidence becomes available for him, on his own initiative to ask the Court of Criminal Appeal to re-examine the case and hear it, in effect, as an appeal.
The main reason why the new Clause cannot be accepted despite the persuasive arguments put forward in its support, is that it confines the new trials procedure to convictions for murder or capital murder, and, in the Government's view, there is no justification for that. If the Departmental Committee's recommendations are to be implemented, it should be in a Bill applying them to all types of crime. I know that it can be said that this is a case where capital sentence is involved, but that is not so under the new Clause, which goes beyond capital murder and extends to the crime of murder as well.
It is for those reasons that I advise the Committee to reject the Clause if it is pressed to a Division, but I am able to give the Committee an assurance that the debate today will be carefully weighed by the Government in considering whether legislative enactment should be given over the whole field of criminal law to the recommendations of the Departmental Committee.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: We have had from this side of the Committee three speeches of great erudition, from my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale), my hon. Friend the Member


for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Stoke Newington and Hackney, North (Mr. Weitzman), The Joint Under-Secretary has given a sympathetic and courteous reply to my hon. Friends, but not one that I personally find at all satisfactory. I agree with the hon. and learned Gentleman on one point. I join with him in not wishing to comment on the cases either of Rowland or Evans or upon the inquiries which were conducted, I think, by Mr. Jolly and Mr. Scott Henderson.
The only thing that I want to say about those cases and those inquiries is that I do not think that either inquiry went all the way towards allaying the public anxiety which was felt about the decisions of the court. Indeed, for many of us, it increased the anxieties that we felt. I should have thought that the procedure of having these inquiries was not altogether satisfactory. If we could have

the provision in the new Clause embodied in the Bill it would go a long way towards convincing the public as a whole that possible miscarriages of justice of this kind would be less likely to occur in the future than they have been in the past.

We ought to try to make swifter progress with the debate if we can, and I therefore conclude by saying that I regret that the hon. and learned Gentleman has had to tell us that the Government have not yet made up their minds about the Report of the Departmental Committee on New Trials. As a spur to greater endeavour and action on the part of the Government, we find it necessary to press the new Clause to a Division.

Question put, That the Clause be read a Second time: —

The Committee divided: Ayes 189, Noes 228.

Division No. 48.]
AYES
[6.36 p.m.


Ainsley, J. W.
Fernyhough, E.
King, Dr. H. M.


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Fienburgh, W.
Lawson, G. M.


Aden, Scholefield (Crewe)
Fletcher, Eric
Lee, Frederick (Newton)


Awbery, S. S.
Forman, J. C.
Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)


Bacon, Miss Alice
Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)
Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)


Balfour, A.
Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.
Lewis, Arthur


Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Gibson, C. W.
Lindgren, G. S.


Benson, G.
Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.
Lipton, Marcus


Bevan, Rt. Hon. A. (Ebbw Vale)
Greenwood, Anthony
Mabon, Dr. J. Dickson


Blackburn, F.
Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.
MacColl J. E.


Blenkinsop, A.
Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)
McGovern, J.


Blyton, W. R.
Griffiths, William (Exchange)
McInnes, J.


Boardman, H.
Grimond, J.
McKay, John (Wallsend)


Bottomley, Rt. Hon. A. G.
Hale, Leslie
McLeavy, Frank


Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S.W.)
Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)
MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)


Bowles, F. G.
Hamilton, W. W.
Matron, Simon


Boyd, T. C.
Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)
Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
Hayman, F. H.
Mason, Roy


Brockway, A. F.
Healey, Denis
Mitchison, G. R.


Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)
Herbison, Miss M.
Moody, A. S.


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Hobson, C. R.
Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)


Burke, W. A.
Holman, P.
Mort, D. L.


Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Holmes, Horace
Moyle, A.


Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Holt, A. F.
Neal, Harold (Bolsover)


Callaghan, L. J.
Houghton, Douglas
Oliver, G. H.


Castle, Mrs. B. A.
Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)
Oswald, T.


Champion, A. J.
Hoy, J. H.
Owen, W. J.


Chetwynd, G. R.
Hubbard, T. F.
Padley, W. E.


Clunie, J.
Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Paling, Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)


Coldrick, W.
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Palmer, A. M. F.


Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)


Cove, W. G.
Hunter, A. E.
Pargiter, G. A.


Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)
Parker, J.


Crossman, R. H. S.
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Parkin, B. T.


Cullen, Mrs. A.
Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.
Paton, John


Davies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)
Janner, B.
Pearson, A.


Davies, Harold (Leek)
Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.
Peart, T. F.


Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
Jeger, Mrs. Lena (Holbn &amp; St. Pncs, S.)
Pentland, N.


Delargy, H. J.
Johnson, James (Rugby)
Plummer, Sir Leslie


Dodds, N. N.
Jones, Rt. Hon. A. Creech (Wakefield)
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)


Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)
Jones, David (The Hartlepools)
Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)


Dye, S.
Jones, Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)
Probert, A. R.


Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Jones, Jack (Rotherham)
Proctor, W. T.


Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Randall, H. E.


Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Redhead, E. C.


Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)
Kenyon, C.
Reeves, J.


Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)
Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)




Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Strauss, Rt. Hon. George (Vauxhall)
White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)


Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.
Wigg, George


Ross, William
Sylvester, G. O.
Wilkins, W. A.


Royle, C.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)
Willey, Frederick


Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.
Taylor, John (West Lothian)
Williams, Rev. Llywelyn (Ab'tillery)


Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Thomas, George (Cardiff)
Williams, Ronald (Wigan)


Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)
Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)


Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)
Thornton, E.
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


Skeffington, A. M.
Timmons, J.
Williams, W.T. (Barons Court)


Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Smith, Ellis (Stoke, s.)
Usborne, H. C.
Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)


Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank
Viant, S. P.
Woodburn, Rt. Hon. A.


Sparks, J. A.
Wade, D. W.
Woof, R. E.


Steele, T.
Warbey, W. N.
Zilliacus, K.


Stewart, Michael (Fulham)
Weitzman, D.



Stones, W. (Consett)
West, D. G.
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.
Wheeldon, W. E.
Mr. Short and Mr. Deer.




NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
Fisher, Nigel
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh


Aitken, W. T.
Fletcher-Cooke, C.
Macdonald, Sir Peter


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Fort, R.
McKibbin, A. J.


Alport, C. J. M.
Fraser, Hon. Hugh (Stone)
Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)


Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)
Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe &amp; Lonsdale)
McLaughlin, Mrs. P.


Anstruther-Gray, Major Sir William
Galbraith, Hon. T. G. D.
Maclay, Rt. Hon. John


Arbuthnot, John
Garner-Evans, E. H.
Maclean, Fitzroy (Lancaster)


Armstrong, C. W.
George, J. C. (Pollok)
McLean, Neil (Inverness)


Ashton, H.
Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan
Macleod, Rt. Hn. Iain (Enfield, W.)


Atkins, H. E.
Gower, H. R.
MacLeod, John (Ross &amp; Cromarty)


Baldwin, A. E.
Grant, W. (Woodside)
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)


Barlow, Sir John
Grant-Ferris, Wg. Cdr. R.(Nantwich)
Maddan, Martin


Barter, John
Green, A.
Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)


Baxter, Sir Beverley
Grosvenor, Lt.-Col. R. G.
Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)


Beamish, Maj. Tufton
Gurden, Harold
Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.


Bell, Philip (Bolton, E.)
Hall, John (Wycombe)
Mariowe, A. A. H.


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)
Marples, A. E.


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Harris, Reader (Heston)
Marshall, Douglas


Bidgood, J. C.
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Mathew, R.


Biggs-Davison, J. A.
Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Macclesfd)
Maude, Angus


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel
Mawby, R. L.


Bishop, F. P.
Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.
Maydon, Lt.-Comdr. S. L. C.


Body, R. F.
Hesketh, R. F.
Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.


Bossom, Sir Alfred
Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.
Morrison, John (Salisbury)


Boyle, Sir Edward
Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)
Nabarro, G. D. N.


Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)
Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)
Nairn, D. L. S.


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Hill, John (S. Norfolk)
Nicholls, Harmar


Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry
Hinchingbrooke, Viscount
Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)


Brooman-White, R. C.
Holland-Martin, C. J.
Nicolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)


Bryan, P.
Hope, Lord John
Nugent, G. R. H.


Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.
Hornby, R. P.
Oakshott, H. D.


Burden, F. F. A.
Hornsby-Smith, Miss M. P.
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D.


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Horobin, Sir Ian
Orr, Capt. L. P. S.


Butler, Rt. Hn. R. A. (Saffron Walden)
Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)
Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)


Carr, Robert
Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.
Osborne, C.


Cary, Sir Robert
Hughes-Young, M. H. C.
Page, R. G.


Chichester-Clark, R.
Hurd, A. R.
Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)


Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Hylton-Foster, Rt. Hon. Sir Harry
Peyton, J. W. W.


Cole, Norman
Iremonger, T. L.
Pickthorn, K. W. M.


Conant, Maj. Sir Roger
Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Pilkington, Capt. R. A.


Cooper-Key, E. M.
Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)
Pott, H. P.


Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.
Jennings, J. C. (Burton)
Powell, J. Enoch


Corfield, Capt. F. V.
Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)


Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.


Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.
Joseph, Sir Keith
Raikes, Sir Victor


Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)
Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lancelot
Rawlinson, Peter


Crowder, Petre (Ruislip-Northwood)
Kaberry, D.
Redmayne, M.


Cunningham, Knox
Keegan, D.
Rees-Davies, W. R.


Currie, C. B. H.
Kerr, H. W.
Remnant, Hon. P.


Dance, J. C. G.
Kimball, M.
Renton, D. L. M.


D'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry
Lagden, G. W.
Rippon, A. G. F.


Deedes, W. F.
Lambert, Hon. G.
Robertson, Sir David


Digby, Simon Wingfield
Lambton, Viscount
Robinson, Sir Roland (Blackpool, S.)


Donaldson, Cmdr. C. E. McA.
Leather, E. H. C.
Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)


Doughty, C. J. A.
Leavey, J. A.
Roper, Sir Harold


du Cann, E. D. L.
Leburn, W. G.
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard


Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.
Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.
Russell, R. S.


Duthie, W. S.
Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)
Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.


Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)
Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)
Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R,


Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn
Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)
Shepherd, William


Errington, Sir Eric
Longden, Gilbert
Simon, J. E. S. (Middlesbrough, W.)


Farey-Jones, F. W.
Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.
Smithers, Peter (Winchester)


Fell, A.
Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)
Soames, Capt. c.


Finlay, Graeme
Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chiswick)
Spearman, Sir Alexander







Speir, R. M.
Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R. (Croydon, S.)
Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)


Stevens, Geoffrey
Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. P.
Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.


Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)
Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.
Watkinson, Rt. Hon. Harold


Stewart, Henderson (Fife, E.)
Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)
Whitelaw, W.S.I.(Penrith &amp; Border)


Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.
Tilney, John (Wavertree)
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Storey, S.
Turner, H. F. L.
Wills, C. (Bridgwater)


Studholme, sir Henry
Vane, W. M. F.
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Summers, Sir Spencer
Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.
Wood, Hon. R.


Sumner, W. D. M. (Orpington)
Vickers, Miss J. H.
Woollam, John Victor


Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)
Vosper, Rt. Hon. D. F.
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


Temple, J. M.
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)



Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)
Wall, Major Patrick
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)
Ward, Rt. Hon. C. R. (Worcester)
Mr. Wakefield and Mr. Barber.

New Clause.—(LEGAL AID FOR EXPERT EVIDENCE.)

Where a prisoner with murder or capital murder is granted legal aid such aid shall include all necessary and proper provision for expert evidence dealing with all matters in dispute upon which scientific or other expert evidence may reasonably be necessary.—[Mr. Elwyn Jones.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

6.45 p.m.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
The position about the provision of expert evidence in legal aid cases is, in the view of my right hon. and hon. Friends, at present somewhat unsatisfactory. First, there appears to be no statutory provision for expert evidence and the matter is left very much to the discretion of clerks of assize. I confess that I myself have never failed, in any given murder case, to get the necessary expert evidence which I have thought it was in the interests of my client to obtain, but that is not a universal experience. Much depends on the willingness of the different clerks of assize in this matter. On this side of the Committee we feel that it should not be left in that uncertain and somewhat discretionary state.
I know that some of my professional colleagues, both counsel and solicitors, have had great difficulty in, for instance, obtaining the services of psychiatrists of standing in murder cases. First, there is the uncertainty as to whether they will be paid at all when their services are called in aid and, secondly, there is the doubt as to whether the payment will be other than derisory.
The legal position about the provision of legal aid at present—I am, of course, subject to correction by the Attorney-General upon this point—is that there are rules relating to the payment of fees to counsel and solicitors. I should add at once that the fees are of a most modest

character, but at least they are provided for. Although the most severe critic of my profession, if he saw the scale, would not be able, if he was maintaining his reason, to contend that the fees were excessive, nevertheless there is provision laid down in the rules and it is better than nothing.
The terms of the law relating to defence of poor persons as laid down in the Poor Prisoners' Defence Act, 1930, are as follows:
Any person committed for trial for an indictable offence shall be entitled to free legal aid in the preparation and conduct of his defence at the trial and to have solicitor and counsel assigned to him for that purpose in the prescribed manner…
Thus, there appears to be no statutory requirement that in necessary cases expert evidence shall always be made available to the defence for the proper conduct of the defence. In practice, expert evidence is allowed. My experience is—I must be frank with the Committee in the matter—that I have not found in a single case any difficulty after a certain amount of pressure has been brought to bear.
However, as the experience of others has not been the same, and as there have been complaints in the Press and elsewhere about the unsatisfactory nature of the present machinery, we feel that the matter could be put beyond doubt by the inclusion in the Bill of the proposed new Clause which states, in precise and specific terms, that
Where a prisoner charged with murder or capital murder is granted legal aid such aid shall include all necessary and proper provision for expert evidence dealing with all matters in dispute upon which scientific or other expert evidence may reasonably be necessary.
That seems to us to be a just and reasonable provision, and I hope that the Attorney-General will be able to accept it.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) for what he has told us, and particularly for the fact that he has had such a happy experience in matters of this kind. I rise only to supplement very briefly the much more experienced advice which he has been able to give us.
I should like to call attention to a number of facts which are given in Mr. Arthur Koestler's "Reflections on Hanging" Mr. Koestler calls attention to a letter from a solicitor, Mr. N. M. Jordan, which appeared in The Times of 9th November, 1955. Mr. Jordan described a case in which he had been involved, in which he had undertaken the defence of a destitute person who was subsequently found guilty of murder. Mr. Jordan said in his letter that counsel for the defence had been awarded fees of five guineas, and that the solicitors, for six appearances at the magistrate's court, had been paid three guineas, whereas leading counsel for the prosecution had been paid 75 guineas.
That letter prompted another letter from a solicitor, Mr. E. T. Williams, which appeared in The Times on 12th November, 1955. Mr. Williams wrote:
I was instructed to act in the defence of a man charged with murder in South Wales earlier this year, and after three to four months' hard work on the case counsel and I were duly rewarded with fees little higher than those received by Mr. Jordan.
Solicitors and counsel do know, however, that when they undertake work of this nature they can expect to be out of pocket at the end of it. But in the case in which I received instructions the defence was one based on insanity, and in these circumstances medical evidence had to be provided by a man well qualified in the highly specialised field of psychiatry. I wrote to the Clerk of the Assize some time prior to the trial setting out an estimate of the fees which the psychiatrist, who had been consulted in the case, proposed to charge, asking whether he considered them reasonable. I had a reply amounting to little more than an acknowledgment in which I was informed that the question of fees was one that would be decided by the Judge at the hearing.
The psychiatrist, a well-qualified man of the first rank, had eight interviews with the prisoner (in the main, at the prison), conducted several searching tests on him, attended three conferences with counsel and myself, prepared detailed reports for the benefit of the defence, and attended throughout the two days which the case lasted at the Assize Court. During this hearing he was subjected to examination

and cross-examination in the witness-box for at least two hours, and was constantly being called upon by counsel for the defence to provide guidance on the medical evidence supplied by the prosecution. Had this psychiatrist been consulted in a civil case, he could have commanded a fee of between 70 and 80 guineas, but for all his labours in this matter he was allowed 12 guineas.
If the Court's attitude to highly qualified medical men in this type of case remains unaltered, solicitors may well expect to find themselves in some considerable embarrassment and difficulty in trying to find psychiatrists of the first rank to undertake such unrewarding work, and the question arises as to whether the public can feel satisfied that a poor person subject to a capital charge will always receive the best advice and assistance available."
In view of Mr. Williams' letter, I think that there are grounds for believing that in many cases the advice of a psychiatrist will not be obtained in circumstances where it should.
I should like to conclude by quoting the views of a friend and former constituent of mine, Dr. J. A. Hobson, the well-known psychiatrist, who gave evidence in the Christie case, and who wrote as follows in the Howard Journal, in 1955:
Recently, there was a man awaiting trial for murder who, for two months between the proceedings in the lower court and the assizes, was not seen by his solicitor. Though the circumstances of his offence were such as to suggest the likelihood of mental abnormality, no effort was made for him to be examined by a psychiatrist. A leading counsel was called in at the last minute. He at once appreciated the omission in the preparation of the case, and on the evening before the trial asked me, apologetically, to examine the man. I did my best, but my examination was too brief to be complete. There was no time to make necessary outside investigations, which I should have done if I had been called earlier, and no time to write a report.
I found Counsel at his club and we had a short conference at 11 p.m. Next morning I gave evidence at the Central Criminal Court and was subjected to hostile examination by the Judge. His summing-up was against us, but the Jury brought in a verdict of ' Guilty, but insane'. I am sure that the verdict was the right one … I am equally sure that if Counsel had not called in a psychiatrist at the eleventh hour, this man would have been found 'Guilty' and might have been hanged.
It is clear that if solicitors themselves are rewarded with inadequate fees for work of this kind they are not, in many cases, likely to go to all the additional expense which may be involved in getting the necessary specialist and scientific evidence which may be required. I think it is placing a quite unfair burden upon solicitors and counsel in cases of this kind. That is why we are proposing that


the new Clause should form a part of the Bill, and I hope the Attorney-General will be able to deal with it sympathetically.

The Attorney-General (Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller): I should like to reply to the serious points put forward by the hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) and the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Anthony Greenwood).
Perhaps I might pick up, straight away, one point made by the hon. Member for Rossendale. I do not think that it is one that he intended to make, and I am sure that, on reflection, he will say that it was merely inaccurate. I do not believe that there is any substance whatever in the view that solicitors do not, because they may be getting low fees for defences under the Poor Prisoners' Defence Act, take every possible and proper step within their power on behalf of their clients. Certainly, that is the custom at the Bar, where the fees, again, are low.
I think that the hon. Gentleman might have used a sentence inadvertently. I feel that when he looks at the report of what he said—I am not seeking to engage in controversy with him—he will find that there was a sentence which, unless corrected, would give rise to the impression that solicitors, because the fees they were receiving had been low did not do all that could be done.

7.0 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I am most grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for pointing that out. That was certainly not the implication which I wished to convey. What I was trying to say was that the resources available to solicitors are so limited that their style is rather cramped and that, possibly, they are prevented from doing everything which they would like to do in the interests of their client.

The Attorney-General: I realised that something more on those lines was really in the hon. Member's mind, but I thought that I would draw his attention to it because I am sure that he would not want a contrary impression to go out.
The new Clause does not raise the thorny and frequently-raised topic of the

adequacy or inadequacy of counsels' fees or solicitors' fees under the Poor Prisoners' Defence Act, 1930. That subject has been raised a great deal in the past and I have answered very many questions on it. It does not arise on this issue and I do not propose to say anything about it.
The Committee will agree, I believe, that there must be a check, some control, on expenditure by the State for the defence. Someone has to do it. When the Legal Aid Scheme was considered very careful thought was given to how that control should be effected, both in civil and criminal cases. In civil cases, of course, where the solicitor thinks an expert witness should be employed, it is possible to go to the area committee and get its approval for the employment of the expert witness. The fee which will be allowed on taxation to that expert witness is still left to the taxing master to assess. In civil proceedings, one can get sanction for the engagement of an expert witness and the taxing master's control is limited to saying what is the proper fee for that expert. He cannot say, "You ought not to have called that expert witness in this case."
The procedure of sending applications to an area committee would not work in criminal cases. I need not go into that, but there are various reasons. Points come up at much shorter periods and that procedure just would not work. I can speak on that with a little authority, as I served on the Rushcliffe Committee on Legal Aid. There must be some other check for the control of public moneys in paying the costs of accused persons. How does that work at present? As the hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South has said, the clerk of assize, or the clerk of the peace—I am dealing with criminal cases generally—acts as a taxing officer. When the case is over, he goes through the bill produced to him by the defendant's solicitors and allows what he thinks proper.
That is how it operates. It resulted in the fact that solicitors appearing for the defence could not know in advance whether the cost of an expert witness would be allowed on taxing and, indeed, they could get no idea of the payment which would be allowed to that expert witness. I gather that the Clause is


designed to try to cure that. When I read the Clause, I was not sure whether it was meant to provide that any witness whom the defence called should be paid out of public funds, leaving the taxing officer merely to tax the quantum, or whether it was designed to put the whole lot on public funds. I fully appreciate, because the hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South made it very clear, that what is really wanted is to get some greater certainty before the trial about the possibility of employing an expert and about the remuneration which that expert is likely to be allowed.
This matter was raised by the Law Society, in 1954. It was said then that it would be a great convenience if solicitors could be informed in advance whether expenditure on expert evidence would be allowed under the defence certificate. Consequent upon those representations, there were discussions between the Law Society and the Lord Chancellor's office and it appeared that the difficulty to which the Law Society was drawing attention was confined to medical evidence in capital cases. As a result of those discussions, the Lord Chancellor's office invited the clerks of assize to consider advanced applications for approval in those cases, that is to say, cases of medical evidence in capital charges.
The Law Society published a notice in its gazette, informing solicitors that when they were acting under a defence certificate in capital cases they should approach the clerk of assize before incurring expenditure on expert medical evidence, and that they would then be given such advice as was possible in the particular circumstances of the case, advice both on the reasonableness of incurring the charges proposed and on the fee which might be allowed. Since that arrangement was made, no further difficulties have been brought to notice in relation to either medical evidence or other expert evidence.
I dare say that the letter which the hon. Member for Rossendale read to the Committee may have been written about events which occurred before that arrangement was made, or perhaps written because that arrangement had not been drawn to the attention of those concerned. In that respect at least the debate

has served a very useful purpose. The Committee will agree that there must be someone to exercise some control, in the sense that public funds could not be expended on paying for a large number of witnesses' attendance when there might be no justification for their attendance. There must be some control over that. There must be some control, also, over amounts.
I believe—and this is confirmed by the fact that there have been no difficulties since it started—that the new arrangement ought to be given a good trial and that it will work very well, indeed. Clerks of assize are persons of great experience in these matters and are able to judge whether the application of the defence solicitor is reasonable. As it is they who will ultimately tax the amount allowed, clerks of assize are able to give a very clear indication in advance about the amount which will be allowed, on taxation, for a particular witness. While I fully appreciate the difficulty in which some solicitors may have been placed in the past, I hope that these new arrangements will avoid those difficulties in future, as, so far as I am aware, they have done since they were introduced.
The hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South was quite right when he said that under Section 3 of the Poor Prisoners' Defence Act, 1930, the sum payable out of local funds for the defence on a defence certificate can include any other expenses, in addition to those of counsel and solicitors and the cost of the depositions, properly incurred in carrying on the defence, and there is no limit to that.
I hope that I have said enough to satisfy the Committee that these arrangements adequately deal with the matter. We cannot accept the new Clause, because, quite apart from the drafting, it does not appear to us to be clear whether it places on the taxation officer a statutory duty to accept a particular type of expenditure, or whether it also goes on to say that he must approve whatever amounts the defence has spent.
The situation is all right at present, but if, in future, there is any difficulty about obtaining information in advance from clerks of assize on the lines suggested, I hope that those difficulties will be brought to the notice of either my noble Friend or myself, because we can


probably overcome them in a friendly manner, having regard to the wide discretion which now exists, rather than by introducing provisions of this kind.

Mr. Hector Hughes: I hope that the learned Attorney-General will think again about this Clause. He puts his opposition to it upon a very poor basis. His excuse is a very poor one when he says that a check must be put on expenditure by the State. Of course, we all agree that a check must be put on expenditure by the State; but, also, a check must be put upon the burdens of proof which are put upon accused persons, and this Bill seeks to put a new burden of proof upon accused persons.
The new Clause is not an unlimited one. It is limited with regard to the expenditure that would be put upon the State. It deals with
The necessary provision for expert examination and evidence …
It is not at large. It is limited to necessary expenditure, but if one looks at Clause 2 (2) of the Bill one seems that it puts a new burden of proof upon the accused. That subsection reads:
On a charge of murder, it shall be for the defence to prove that the person charged is by virtue of this section not liable to be convicted of murder.
I would remind the Attorney-General that it is the business of the Crown to see that justice is done and it is not the business of the Crown to get a conviction at any price, even by the exclusion of expert evidence. I am surprised to find that any member of the Bar, a fortiori the Attorney-General, objecting to a Clause of this sort, which would not give undue assistance to an accused person.
All that we ask is that when this new burden of adducing expert evidence is put upon the accused, at least the Crown should accord to the accused the opportunity of adducing evidence to discharge the new burden of proof. I would have thought that the inherent rightness and rightousness of this new Clause would have appealed to the Attorney-General. The Crown has adequate resources to get all the evidence, expert and other that it requires. Why should the accused not be given co-relative opportunities to defend himself, especially, as I have said, where there is this added burden upon the accused?
On all these grounds, I ask the Attorney-General to consider his ethics, to consider his sense of justice to accused persons, and to realise that the Crown's duty is not at any cost and at any price to seek to get a conviction. The duty of the Crown is to see that justice is done and to give the accused a fair opportunity of defending himself. That is all that this Clause, limited in its expression, would do.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: While I am most grateful to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Hector Hughes) for his spirited defence of the new Clause which I have moved, I am bound to confess that in view of the observations of the Attorney-General I shall not be disposed to press it to a Division.
I am reassured by the attitude which the Attorney-General has adopted towards this matter, but I must say to him that it would not be right to say that there are no difficulties in the operation of this matter at the present time. It would be invidious of me to refer to a clerk of assize of any particular circuit, but it is within my knowledge that in one assize, before a leading counsel charged with the responsibility of conducting a defence was able to obtain the services of the required psychiatrist, that counsel had to threaten to withdraw from the case, which fearful sanction was enough to induce that clerk of assize to give way. I am not identifying the clerk of assize, and I hope that anything that I say will not be related to any particular person.

The Attorney-General: If the hon. and learned Gentleman would like to discuss that with me later I should be glad to do so, and perhaps avoid the necessity of giving any further publicity to what must have been a very unfortunate incident; and publicity that might lead to certain suspicions being aroused in some quarters.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: That may be the more expedient course from everyone's point of view. I attach importance to the matters which have emerged in this debate, and I trust that the publicity which will follow from the discussion that we have had will draw the attention of solicitors to their rights under the new arrangements and will also draw to the attention of clerks of assize in particular their responsibilities.
Certainly, those of us on this side of the Committee who have proposed this new Clause do so in no reckless disregard of the need for having control over public expenditure. Of course, we appreciate the necessity that there should be responsibility in that regard. On the other hand, we attach very great importance to equality before the law, the absolute necessity that there should not be one law for the rich and one for the poor in a capital case, or, indeed, in any other criminal case. There is no doubt that the arrangements which exist still do give certain advantages to the rich man accused of murder. I think, however, that through changes in the administration of justice in this century the differences have been narrowed down a good deal, and that, certainly in some areas, a good deal of latitude is allowed for the provision of the best man available on behalf of the defence in murder cases. But it is important that we should not relax in our determination to maintain the principle of equality before the law. I am glad that that is the approach which has actuated the mind of the Attorney-General in this matter, and in view of the assurances which have been given from the Front Bench opposite, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion and Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause.—(EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES.)

Where any person has been convicted of murder falling within Section five or Section six of this Act, the jury so convicting him shall, after the conviction has been recorded, be required to consider on such evidence as shall be offered on either side whether there exist in that case extenuating circumstances and on their recording a verdict that there are such extenuating circumstances that person shall not be liable to suffer death.

Provided that where a person has pleaded guilty to murder falling within Section five or Section six, a jury shall be empanelled before sentence is passed to inquire whether extenuating circumstances exist and on their recording a verdict that there are such extenuating circumstances, that person shall not be liable to suffer death.—[Mr. S. Silverman.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. S. Silverman: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
The Clause has the double distinction of having been unanimously recommended by the Royal Commission and almost unanimously rejected by legal

opinion afterwards. Those two statements are not quite so irreconcilable as they sound. The Royal Commission was fully conscious of all that could be urged against the proposal, and most of those who have found it unattractive have not been worried by it, because they have been in favour of abolishing the death penalty.
The Royal Commission's proposal was that where there is a charge of murder—although in this case it should be "where there is a charge of capital murder"—if the accused pleads guilty the trial shall proceed like any other trial. Evidence shall be called both ways; there shall be speeches and a summing-up, and the whole proceedings shall be directed to the single issue which the jury has been charged to determine, namely, whether the prisoner at the Bar be guilty or not.
What is then suggested is that unless the jury finds that he is not guilty, which, naturally, is the end of the whole proceedings, instead of the court proceeding directly to sentence there is, as it were, a second trial which is directed, in effect, to deciding whether or not, in all the circumstances, the murder ought to be visited with the capital penalty.
In other words, if I may paraphrase the proposal, the jury which has convicted the accused must then be invited to decide whether or not it will make a recommendation to mercy—as in many cases it does—with the proviso that if it does so the death sentence shall be neither pronounced nor carried out, and that this second verdict shall be arrived at with both prosecution and defence entitled to lead and to cross-examine such evidence as it thinks fit to place before the jury upon that issue.
Whether that second proposal is quite in accordance with what the Royal Commission recommended I am not sure; it probably is not. I myself would conceive, however, that if the issue is to be decided by a jury it should be decided on such evidence as may be called.

Mr. Philip Bell: Will the hon. Gentleman help us by giving a definition of "extenuating circumstances"? That is the difficulty. Does mercy killing provide an extenuating circumstance? Is shooting a Fascist dictator an act in respect of which extenuating circumstances could be pleaded? We must have some definition.

Mr. Silverman: I see no reason why I should give any definition at all. I think that it would militate very greatly against the usefulness of the proposal if Parliament were to limit the discretion of the jury in such cases by laying down a statutory definition of "extenuating circumstances". That would fly directly in the face of all that is claimed to be of advantage in the proposal, for reasons to which I shall refer shortly. If the hon. and learned Member for Bolton, East (Mr. Philip Bell) will have the patience to listen to me, I think that he will understand my argument, although I may not be able to persuade him of the merits of the proposal.
My own view is that if a jury is to be invited to say whether or not a certain murder was, in circumstances of that nature, to be regarded as carrying the capital penalty, it should do so upon evidence. It is obvious that we could not have a trial in which only one side was entitled to advance evidence or offer argument. The difficulties which the hon. and learned Member sees would be no difficulties at all, because any deliberations for or against the proposition that extenuating circumstances existed would be offered to the jury, thus avoiding the necessity for limiting and question-begging definitions.

Mr. Charles Doughty (Surrey, East): It is not so much the jury or those who have to cross-examine the witnesses who will be in difficulty; it is the judge who has to direct the jury upon the question whether there are extenuating circumstances. Is he to be given no assistance in these cases?

Mr. Silverman: If we had any definition I believe that, so far from giving the judge assistance, it would make his task infinitely more difficult.

Mr. Doughty: The Clause is ridiculous without a definition.

Mr. Silverman: It will help if hon. Members are not too hasty either in forming opinions or in intervening. I say that with diffidence because I very often intervene myself, but in this case it is better to see the argument in the round before bringing in particular points; otherwise, we may take an unbalanced view of the matter.
I say at once that the objections to the proposal are only too obvious. The first

is, as the hon. and learned Member for Bolton, East has said, the extreme difficulty of forming any clear view—as a matter of principle—of what amounts to extenuating circumstances. Of course, it is an extremely difficult question—and it is precisely for that reason that it is probably better, if we are entertaining the proposal, to leave both judge and jury unfettered. I certainly agree that it will be an extremely difficult task whether we define it or not.

Mr. Paget: Both in France and in some of the States of America they have this provision, and it works quite satisfactorily. There is no definition; the question is left entirely to the jury. Belgium is another country where the provision operates quite satisfactorily.

Mr. Silverman: If my hon. Friends and hon. Members opposite make my argument one piece at a time they will save me from having to trouble the Committee at all.
I am much obliged to my hon. and learned Friend. I know that this proposal is not entirely new. First, however, I want to submit what the difficulties are because even though it works very satisfactorily in many countries—which is because in those countries the difficulties have been overcome; and I agree with my hon. and learned Friend that they are by no means insuperable—I must concede that the difficulties are there. The first one is that which I have just mentioned.
The second is that it seems, at any rate at first sight, to introduce a new principle into our criminal law. It has always been said that the functions of the judge and the jury are quite different; that whereas it is in every way right that the jury should decide questions of fact, and the judge has nothing whatever to do with that part of the case, so, when the conviction has been recorded, it is the business of the judge—the jury having nothing to do with it—to say what shall be the penalty. This is a clear division of functions which, over a great part of our law, works very well indeed, and I think that few, if any, would seek to change it.
7.30 p.m.
The second important objection to this proposal is that at first sight, it seems to change and confuse what always has been the separate functions of judge and jury.


Without wishing to labour this unduly, I suggest that neither objection is insuperable. I will take the first one, where the circumstances in a particular case justify the conclusion that there are sufficient extenuating circumstances to make it wholly wrong to execute the supreme penalty. I suggest that the argument is not carried much further when we say that this is a difficult question. Of course it is, but it is one which has to be decided in each particular case.
Were we able to say, "This is so difficult a question that we will not try to decide it at all," then the objection as to difficulty would be a good one. But that is not the situation. In the law as it stands, and as it will be if the Government have their way with this Bill, the situation is that that question will have to be decided in every case by someone, and, in connection with the circumstances of each case, considered on the merits of that case.
Against the proposal of the Royal Commission it is said that it is better that the Home Secretary should do it as he always has done. In the light of all we now know, does anyone really think that this is a question better decided in secret by one man? It is said that this is an enormously burdensome task to lay upon a jury. But there are not many juries in murder cases. A very small percentage of the community would ever have this duty to discharge and no one would ever have to discharge it alone. Is that not better than that every single case over the period during which he holds office should be decided by the Home Secretary, by one person? If the thing be so burdensome, surely it is better to spread the burden than to saddle one unfortunate Minister with the job of reaching a decision.
Were decisions reached according to ascertainable principles, it might be possible to argue that it is better done by one man, who could apply a similar kind of yardstick over a period, than to leave it to be decided specifically in each case; when, in one case, there might be a sympathetic jury and, in another, a more hard-hearted or callous jury. But the Home Office has always told us that each case is considered on its merits. Without putting too fine a point on it, or comparing the record of one man with another, obviously it is true to say—and it

will be readily conceded—that Home Secretaries differ one from another as much as juries might be expected to do. So the objection about the supreme difficulty or the arduous nature of the job does not take us much further, since a decision has to be made.
Let us come to the second main objection which is, of course, a serious one: that we are taking away from the judge and giving to the jury the right to decide sentence. But we are not really. This is the one case in which the judge cannot decide sentence. He has no discretion. The whole point of the principle of allowing the jury to decide the question of guilt and, the jury having brought in a conviction, then leaving it to the judge to impose what he, in his judicial experience considers, the proper penalty, goes by the board as soon as we realise that in this case the judge cannot use his discretion. He cannot seek to make the punishment fit the crime, or measure the penalty by the degree of moral turpitude involved, or the presence or absence of extenuating circumstances.
In every other case, yes; because in every other case there is a range within which the judge is allowed freedom of manoeuvre and elasticity in his judgment. But this is a rigid penalty. So it is no use saying that we are taking from the judge the power to determine sentence. In capital cases the judge has no power to determine the sentence. All we are really doing is taking away the question of a reprieve from the secret, uncontrolled, unexplained, unjustified, undiscussed decision of the Home Secretary—taken no man knows how—and giving it to a jury in respect of whose decision everyone will be able to say, "That is what they had before them; we know exactly what they had to decide and we know what they decided." It seems to me that these are powerful answers to what I concede are powerful objections.
Finally, I wish to direct the attention of the Committee to the circumstances which made the Royal Commission unanimous about this proposal. It is no light thing that the Royal Commission was unanimous, because, seeing as it clearly did, all the difficulties, anticipating, as it clearly did, that the proposal would be unattractive in many influential quarters, the Royal Commission nevertheless decided, by a unanimous vote, to


make the recommendation. Its reason was exactly the rigidity of the law which it was appointed to consider. Everyone who has taken part in this discussion in modern times has put his finger on the basic weakness of our law of murder. It is that murder is not one crime; it is a wide variety of crimes.
People sometimes say that murder is the worst of crimes and deserves the heaviest of penalties. Certainly, some murders are the worst of crimes, but not all. I can think of some crimes which are not murders and are not capital crimes, but which are much worse than some of the murders we have heard about. Every hon. Member of this Committee, and certainly every hon. Member who practices law, knows that. It is not true that murder is always the worst crime. The weakness of our law is that all those things called murder, and which are murder by our law, are not one crime at all, but a wide variety of crimes. Yet the law insists on attaching to all of them the same penalty, and that the most severe penalty which it is in our power as a community to attach.
The problem, more for the retentionist than for the abolitionist, is how to alter the law as to avoid that situation and to have a variety of penalties in respect of a wide variety of crimes. Once we embark upon that investigation we discover, as everybody discovers who has ever made the attempt, that it cannot be done easily. If ever there were a demonstration of that fact, it is in the Bill. The Government have found that the degree of moral turpitude does not provide a suitable yardstick. They have tried the principle of public order, as if it were conceivable that some murders would be an offence against public order and others would not. They have narrowed it down by a definition in which they talk about the rights of property, a very strange principle to apply in such a context.
The hon. and learned Member the Joint Under-Secretary of State shakes his head. I shall not delay the Committee by quoting things that have been said from the Government Dispatch Box attempting to justify the distinctions made, but I think there will be universal agreement that if the Government are seeking to satisfy the public sense of

justice the Bill lamentably fails. I am sure there are Government supporters who believe that although the Bill does not satisfy anybody's sense of justice it is nevertheless right. I am trying to show that every attempt made by anybody by whatever method and in whatever context to differentiate the penalty according to some differentiation of the crime ends in failure. I do not think anyone will seriously dispute that.
If we cannot have the penalty fitting the crime by classifying the crimes, what are we to do? The Royal Commission said that in those circumstances there was nothing left but to leave the decision to be made without classification or categories but by individual cases being taken on their merits. The task of the jury in that position is no more difficult than under the Bill. It will not be more difficult to define or decide in a particular case whether there are extenuating circumstances than to decide whether it is a case of diminished responsibility. These are all difficult questions, but the task will not be made any greater by the course which I am suggesting.
7.45 p.m.
Ultimately, the Commission said, when the advantages are weighed against the disadvantages and we decide that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, and that we could not modify the law at all, we had better abolish it. That is the dilemma in which the Royal Commission has left the Government. The Royal Commission was not asked to consider abolition but what modifications were possible on the basis that capital punishment for some murders was to be retained. It came to the unanimous conclusion that there was only one way to do it, but the Government say, "We are not prepared to do it in that way". If we are not prepared to do it as the Commission proposed, and there is no modification or qualification justified, we shall have to abolish the law altogether; but the Government refuse to do that.
The Government insist upon trying to distinguish one murder from another by a yardstick that is plainly unsatisfactory and in the teeth of the unanimous opinion that that cannot be done. Having decided that they will retain capital punishment and will change the law to make it less rigid, more adaptable and more in conformity with the natural sense


of justice, the Government's only decent course is to accept my proposal, either in the form in which I make it, or in the form in which the Royal Commission made it, but anyhow to accept the principle and to incorporate it in the Bill.

Mr. Doughty: I ask the Committee not to accept the proposed new Clause, which is much more revolutionary than anything I have heard for a very long time respecting the practice of the law.
It would mean that at the conclusion of a possibly lengthy trial the jury would have to start all over again with a new trial on the question of extenuating circumstances. One of the elements of our criminal law is that the parties, and particularly the accused, know the evidence which to be called in the case. Before any trial takes place and after we decide whether a man is guilty or not of murder, are we to give notice to him that after conviction we propose to call evidence to prove that there were extenuating circumstances?
It would mean that at every criminal trial the accused would be faced with the knowledge that he did not know all the evidence that was going to be called, and counsel for the prosecution and defence would have to go to the court armed with evidence, on the assumption that the conviction was going to take place, in order to prove or disprove that there were extenuating circumstances.
I have no hesitation in saying that, although I have the greatest respect for the common sense shown by juries, we could not have a more unsuitable tribunal than a jury to decide this question. It is difficult for any Home Secretary to decide it, although he has opportunities for making examinations, sending for people, including the very judge who tried the case, and of cogitating upon the matter and coming to an unhurried conclusion. Is it fair or right to ask twelve people to come to such a conclusion immediately after hearing such evidence as may be called before them upon this one case?
Look at the wording, "extenuating circumstances" what does that mean? In nearly every case it can be urged that there were extenuating circumstances. If one person has been annoyed by another by means of unjustifiable words, and he murders, it is an extenuating circumstance

that he was annoyed by the offensive words. Are we to say that that person ought not to be convicted of wilful murder? How can any judge who is doing his duty properly direct the jury on what is meant by "extenuating circumstances" in such a way as to bring the crime from the category of wilful murder to one in which the penalty for murder should not be imposed? This proposed new Clause would not only impose a radical change in the law, but it would impose upon judges and juries tasks which for them would be quite impossible, and it would certainly result in far more miscarriages of justice than can possibly occur under any branch of the law at present existing.

Mr. Hector Hughes: The hon. and learned Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty) has stigmatised this very proper new Clause as revolutionary. That does not seem to me to be a good argument. In the first place, it is not revolutionary, as I hope to show, and, in the second place, even if it be, that is not a reason for rejecting it. It should be considered, and accepted or rejected on its merits.
The hon. and learned Gentleman also asked whether it would be fair to ask the same jury immediately after the trial to try another issue arising on the same set of facts. It seems to me that the answer is not the one he gave, but is obviously "yes". They are the best tribunal because they are already conversant with the facts. They have just been hearing the facts. They have heard them adduced in evidence.

Mr. Doughty: I said nothing of the sort. What I said was a fresh trial upon fresh evidence of which no notice has been given—not upon the facts which they have already heard.

Mr. Hughes: Precisely. It is a fresh trial on the same or further evidence which would be relevant to the question of extenuating circumstances, and it seems to me that that very jury would be the best tribunal to try that second issue not only at the most appropriate time but at the only time when it would be possible for them to do it.
I support this proposed new Clause because it seems to me to be inherently just. I think I am right in saying that the mover said—and if he did I agree with


him—that it gives legislative effect to long practice. The mover of the Clause made a very powerful argument. It has long been the practice in our courts for juries to recommend to mercy. That was a disorderly and illogical way of expressing their opinion upon the issue of extenuating circumstances. But the proposal in this new Clause puts that disorderly and illogical procedure upon a logical basis. Let us look at it clearly. It proposes first the trial on the issue of murder, and if the jury should come to the conclusion that the accused is guilty of either kind of murder—murder simpliciter or capital murder—then under this new Clause they would be asked to try the second issue.
The effect of this is clear and practicable. The hon. and learned Member for Surrey, East asked for a definition of extenuating circumstances. He said this issue could not be tried without a definition of extenuating circumstances. It seems to me that it would be impossible to define extenuating circumstances because for many reasons they are so various. I am sure the hon. and learned Gentleman would agree that they are even more various than the length of the Lord Chancellor's foot. It seems to me that this question of extenuating circumstances is essentially a question of fact for the jury and not for the judge.
The whole basis of this proposed new Clause seems to me, put shortly, to be this. It is best to decide one issue at a time. A jury would be asked to decide the one question of murder—guilty or not guilty—and then if they found a verdict of murder, what would be more natural than for them to proceed to consider and determine the other issue of extenuating circumstances? The jury is the proper tribunal to do it, and that is the proper time to do it because they will have just heard all the direct evidence in the trial on the issue of murder. Then they proceed to the second issue of extenuating circumstances or no extenuating circumstances.
It is obvious that the jury are the proper people to hear and determine that issue, and, indeed, to hear any further evidence which may be relevant to the issue of extenuating circumstances, and that is the proper time to do it. The proper time is immediately after the conviction. The same jury, conversant with those facts, reconsider the evidence, consider any fresh evidence relevant to that

particular issue, and in that way justice will be done.
It seems to me that this new Clause may have a certain appearance of novelty about it, but fundamentally and essentially it is a good Clause which will help the operation of justice. I therefore support it.

Mr. Ede: All hon. Members who have so far taken part in this debate are lawyers. I am not a lawyer, and I am not going to deal with the legalistic part of the arguments, but I have had a little experience of dealing with the results of the deliberations of juries on the simple issue of guilty or not guilty.
I have been very happy to be associated so far with my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) in his opposition to this Bill and in the promotion of the Bill which he introduced in the last Session. I regret, therefore, that on this occasion I find it impossible to agree with him, and if this matter goes to a Division I shall have to vote against the new Clause.
In the first place, I am not certain what happens if the jury disagree on the second issue. That is a very important point. I can only assume that there might be a second trial on that issue—not before the jury which heard the whole of the first case, but before a new jury, and, as far as I can see, then the whole case would virtually have to be retried.

8.0 p.m.

Mr. Silverman: Perhaps my right hon. Friend will remember that according to the Royal Commission's proposal, albeit not reproduced in this new Clause, before the decision of the jury about extenuating circumstances had any application, there had to be a unanimous verdict.

Mr. Ede: My hon. Friend is always complaining that other people anticipate the points he is going to make, but he is very adept at falling into the same error himself. This is a very good example of it.
One of the things which is said, and it is, I agree, a very weighty argument, is that in existing circumstances the final decision is left to one man, the Home Secretary. If a jury has to be unanimous, it may very well be that again the decision is left to one man or woman, that one man or woman not communing with his


or her own conscience but with eleven other people who have made up their minds.
I served on a jury only once; it was a coroner's jury. I was faced with a situation where I was one against eleven. In the end we were unanimous because the eleven came to the conclusion that it was easier for them to agree with me than for me to agree with them. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale) today instanced a case where, as he said, there were two trials, and somehow or other he knows that at the first the jury were eleven to one in favour of taking one course and at the second trial the jury were eleven to one in favour of taking the other course. But on each occasion the jury disagreed.
I have never heard of any scheme for dealing with this matter of what is to happen when a person has been found guilty of a capital crime which did not in the end leave it possibly to the decision of one person. I would say that if it has to be left to the decision of one person it is better that he should be one person acting with a sense of direct and imposed personal responsibility rather than one person who accidentally finds himself in that position.
There have been suggestions, for instance, though not in this new Clause, that there should be a committee of five to advise the Home Secretary. I have never been quite sure how that committee would deliberate and reach a decision. In fact, I think it is sometimes suggested that such a committee should have power to decide by a majority. Even then, with a committee of five, if it is two and two with the fifth man having to give his declaration, it is the decision of one person again. If the five are to be unanimous, four wishing to take the more extreme course and one against, the responsibility is again left on one person.
One must be very careful on these occasions not to get into difficulty under the Official Secrets Act. Although I have no doubt that the privilege of the House would protect one, I want to be very careful how far I give indications which migh embarrass other people who have to fill the responsible office of Home Secretary in this respect in the future. I hope the Committee will accept that

on all the files of my predecessors which I examined there was always an indication that very great care had been taken in reaching a decision.
When one has a case which may be border-line, one has put in front of one the files which deal with similar cases in the past. One has the opportunity of examining them. One can call for any advice, professional or lay, which one may feel one ought to have before reaching a decision. I cannot conceive of any jury having the opportunity of considering in public some of the things which a Home Secretary feels he ought to know. In fact, I can think of circumstances in which the person one would have to call in public, if that were the procedure, would be very reluctant indeed to come to give in public the kind of statement which he will, I do not say willingly, but quite unreservedly make when he knows that it will not go beyond the responsible person who has sent for him.
I have greatly admired the courage of my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne in the fight he has put up against this Bill. I regret that I was not in this country when he started his fight. Had I been, we might not have got as far by tonight as we have. Since I have come back, this is the first occasion on which I have not very heartily supported every proposal he has put forward, and I hope he will acquit me of doing on this occasion other than give my honest opinion to the Committee, as I know he would desire me to do if I felt I had to speak at all.
I am bound to say that I do not like the idea of imposing this further task upon a jury at the end of a long case. During the course of a trial, the members of a jury have been put to very severe mental tests when, as in my experience juries generally do, they have tried to follow meticulously every twist and turn in the case, when they have listened to the closing appeals of counsel and the summing up of the judge, and have then retired and considered the evidence they have heard, sometimes trying to disentangle it from some of the closing speeches which have followed the evidence.
We must remember that the twelve men or women of a jury have been brought together for this particular occasion. Many of them will never have been in a court


before. I sometimes feel that those of us, not only counsel or solicitors but magistrates, who attend courts fairly frequently do sometimes fail to realise when we are at quarter sessions the different attitude that jury men and jury women, who have never been in a court before, take towards the course of a trial conducted before them compared with the attitude of those of us who are more accustomed to the process. To impose this further new duty upon them would. I think, he to put upon them an intolerable burden.
I think, too, that most of the things that would be present to their minds can generally be conveyed to the Home Secretary by the judge. Generally—I hope I am not saying anything that goes just beyond what I ought to say—a judge does pass some comment on the calibre of the jury which tried the case. I am quite sure my hon. Friend will understand what I mean. It is a difficult idea to convey, but there are some juries which are rather better than others. That is always assuming that all juries are good. It is not saying that there are bad juries and good juries, but is merely saying that some juries are better than others. By the attitude that they have adopted while they have been in the box, possibly for four or five days, they show a discrimination that entitles the judge to make comments particularly on the recommendations that they have made.
As I understand, nothing in the Bill prevents the jury from making a recommendation if they think fit. They may find a man or woman guilty of capital murder and are then perfectly entitled to make a recommendation in such terms as they think fit. I shall not comment on the way that some of these recommendations appear to have been reached. All I say is that I imagine juries will still have that power.
For the reasons I have given—and after all I was Home Secretary for a longer period than any other person since the great Reform Act; that was mere survival—

Mr. S. Silverman: It was good survival.

Mr. Ede: It was my survival. In my experience, people were very jealous of other people's jobs, but nobody was ever jealous of the Home Secretary's job—

that might have helped my survival. But I did have to have a number of consultations; I did make certain minor administrative arrangements with regard to the way in which I could get advice in the way of widening it, which, I have no doubt, the Joint Under-Secretary will be able to find out about when he gets back to the office. Heavy as the responsibility is—and it is a responsibility that no man should ever hunger to have—I believe that that is the best way of discharging it of all those that have been suggested so far. As far as I am concerned, I cannot do other than oppose the new Clause.

Mr. Frederick Willey: I do not wish to detain the Committee for more than a few minutes, but as I had the pleasure and privilege of serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) I must say that I disagree with almost everything he has said. I am still convinced by the very lucid argument deployed by my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman).

Mr. S. Silverman: This is surely much more revolutionary than anything I said.

Mr. Ede: I am quite sure that my hon. Friend will agree that he was never consulted about any of these issues himself, nor either invited or allowed to express any opinion.

Mr. Willey: I at once assure my right hon. Friend that there is no danger of any breach of the Official Secrets Act. I wish to deal with the matter in very general terms.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne admitted from the start, there are many disadvantages in this proposal, but the disadvantages arise out of the retention of capital punishment. There are bound to be difficulties as long as capital punishment remains. As I understand its Report, the Royal Commission was implicit that the time had come for the abolition of capital punishment. It was explicit that if capital punishment was retained, allowing for all the disadvantages this was the best course to follow. I therefore call the attention of the Committee to the fact that the Government, in resisting the Clause, as


I anticipate they will, are rejecting entirely the recommendations of the Royal Commission.

8.15 p.m.

What is the main disadvantage of the present procedure? Why should it be offensive to all lawyers? The reason is that here we have the most serious major penalty determined, not by judicial process, but by executive action. That is the most offensive of all the alternatives.

Mr. Ede: Does my hon. Friend mean to say that if the new Clause is carried, when a jury finds that it is a case of capital murder without extenuating circumstances, the Home Secretary will not still have the duty of considering whether he shall make a recommendation to the Crown?

Mr. Wiley: That would be a diminished disadvantage still persisting. The major disadvantage, the thing which should be abhorrent to all lawyers—it may be unavoidable, but the argument that it is unavoidable has not been advanced—is that this decision of life and death is taken by executive action. My right hon. Friend cannot inform the Committee upon what grounds it is taken.
What is the purpose of raising the question of what are extenuating circumstances when no one has the slightest idea what are extenuating circumstances at the moment? No one has the slightest idea of what factors are taken into account by the Home Secretary when taking his decision. We know, because Home Secretaries in the past have made revelations, that some Home Secretaries have exercised their responsibilities on what, to lawyers, are very odd grounds. We know that one of the most distinguished of Home Secretaries exercised the power of recommending a reprieve on what, to anyone else, would be regarded as a very trifling circumstance.
We do not criticise him for that—it showed that he had a large, generous heart and human compassion—but the factor which he revealed as the one apparently determining the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, against the advice given to him Departmentally, was not a matter which would carry very much weight with people who are judicially trained.
I should have thought that as in this Bill we are retaining capital murders on

the express ground that these murders are offensive to the Queen's peace—in other words, we are retaining them in the name of the State—it was incumbent upon the court to examine in open court the question of extenuating circumstances. This might be very difficult. It might lead to a patent and obvious distinction and differences in criteria taken by different courts, but that would be an argument—an unavoidable argument—for proceeding to the abolition of capital punishment. If we retain capital murder on the ground that these murders are particularly offensive to the Queen's peace, we ought to make it the responsibility of the court to determine whether there are extenuating circumstances.
It is conceded that Her Majesty's judges are not very enthusiastic about accepting this responsibility and we, I think, would take the view that it would be placing a very heavy burden upon them to take the decision as to extenuating circumstances. We therefore, I should have thought, would be bound to accept the conclusion very reluctantly arrived at by the Royal Commission and to say that if we had reached this stage in the reduction of capital murders, it would be right and proper that this is a question which ought to be considered in open court.

Mr. Simon: The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) has never been afraid of being in a minority or of urging a minority view, and, naturally, he is not deterred in this case by the fact that, as he says, the overwhelming mass of legal opinion is against him— and. I think it would be fair to say, public opinion as expressed in the organs of the Press on the publication of the Royal Commission's Report—is against this proposal. Perhaps he rather naturally clings to the fact that this was a unanimous recommendation of the Royal Commission.
I confess that my initial approach to this problem, when I was allowed to have a mind of my own and was not merely part of a powerful collective mind, was even more of a minority view. I found myself attracted by the South African system whereby the jury could find extenuating circumstances but would be required by the judge to state what they were, and the sentence of the court then fell to be determined by the judge on the answer of the jury.
I see that that seems to get some measure of approbation from some hon. Members here, but, on the whole, it did not commend itself very far; yet it always seemed to me to be the best system if we were to have this sort of discretion. As the hon. Gentleman very fairly said, this jury discretion has not commended itself to informed opinion, and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) has given the Committee some overwhelming reasons why it is not acceptable.
The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne put forward the fact that it was a recommendation of the Royal Commission. I think that the first thing to note is that it was on a narrow balance of argument, and in the context of the old law and not of the law as amended and, as I believe, very much improved and humanised by this Bill. Secondly, the Royal Commission never put its scheme to the witnesses who came before it, and the debates in the House of Lords on this very matter show that there were a number of arguments which the Royal Commission did not consider and which were put forward by former Home Secretaries like Lord Simon and Lord Samuel.
Thirdly, it does seem to me that it would be wrong to treat the recommendations of the Royal Commission as in any way sacrosanct. We are bound to be most grateful to the Royal Commission for the superb piece of documentation which its Report represents and for the very clear way that every issue is argued, but, after all, if we look through the Bill so far as it has been approved by this Committee, we find that we have not accepted the Royal Commission's recommendations about constructive malice, for we have gone farther in some respects than the Royal Commission. The proposals relating to diminished responsibility have had, I think, the unanimous approbation of this Committee, and yet the Royal Commission came down against them.
As to suicide pacts, this Committee has found it right to go to some extent beyond what the Royal Commission recommended. Therefore, it seems to me that it would be illogical and unsound to say that, because, on a very narrow balance of argument, it came down in

favour of jury discretion on extenuating circumstances, it should have any undue weight with this Committee.
Moreover, the hon. Gentleman's proposal differs in an important respect from the recommendation of the Royal Commission. What he says, to meet, I think, an overwhelming argument that was put forward in the debates in the House of Lords, is that it should be evidence called by the prosecution as well as the defence, and that the evidence of the defence shall be cross-examined. It was pointed out in the debates in the House of Lords that the Royal Commission's scheme whereby it was only the defence which would call evidence and address the jury at the second trial was open to very grave objections, one of the weightiest of which was that it put the judge, who had to sum up after one side of the presentation of a case, in an impossible position. The hon. Gentleman has gone counter to the recommendation of the Royal Commission to try to meet that objection.
I would remind him—I am sure that he has it in mind, because he knows this Report so thoroughly—of what the Royal Commission said, because it puts the objection to his proposal so clearly. In paragraph 560 the Royal Commission said about this very proposal:
It would, however, be contrary to the recognised traditions of the Bar that counsel for the prosecution should be put in a position where he was pressing for the death sentence or even appeared to be doing so. It would therefore seem preferable that he should take no active part in the proceedings on the issue of sentence, but should be present only as amicus curiae. He should not call witnesses, or cross-examine witnesses called by the defence; nor should be his duty to put before the court any information favourable or unfavourable, about the prisoner's character or antecedents.
Then there is the further objection, which was put forward by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty) on this aspect of the new Clause, that in a trial, normally and almost necessarily, according to our thoughts as to fairness to the defence, the defence knows in advance what evidence will be called from the depositions given before the magistrates, which tell the defence what case they are going to meet. For the second part of the trial, whereby mitigating circumstances are determined, it would be very difficult to devise machinery to provide for that sort of thing


which would not be open to very grave objection from the point of view of the defence.
The hon. Gentleman goes on to say that whether there are circumstances which demand a capital sentence must be answered in any event, and that the jury is a better tribunal to decide that than the Home Secretary. That is really the crux of the matter. I would be the first to recognise the force of his observation, which was put with great power by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Sunderland, North (Mr. Willey), that here we are leaving the determination of the sentence in effect to be made by the Home Secretary on the advice and representations privately tendered, and no reasons being given.
One of the reasons which, I know, animated my hon. Friend the Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) in pressing, as he did, for the defence of diminished responsibility to be added to our code of homicide was to limit the generality of these cases because that was a discrepancy between the rigidity of the M'Naghten Rules on the one hand and the mental factors taken into account by the Home Secretary on the other.
That has now been amended by Clause 2 and it seems to me that takes away a great deal of force from the objection put forward by the hon. Member for Sunderland, North (Mr. Willey). But in the end the answer, it seems to me, with respect, was conclusively given by the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede). He told us what I did not know before—that he had held office longer than any Home Secretary since the Reform Bill, which leads me to wonder whether his spiritual ancestor was Sir Robert Peel or Lord Sidmouth.

Mr. Ede: Mine is Sir William Harcourt.

8.30 p.m.

Mr. Simon: At any rate, we recognise that the right hon. Gentleman speaks from great experience in these matters, and he has pointed out that the Home Secretary is able to weigh here a great many factors, far more factors than are open to any jury. He can weigh matters that would be very difficult to present properly to a jury. He has a consistent yardstick, owing to the tradition of his

office, which has been remarkably consistent. The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) says that the Home Secretary varies as much as a jury in his judgment, but the answer to that was given in the Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, I think in paragraphs 38 to 43, where it dealt with the Home Secretary's discretion to advise the exercise of the Royal Prerogative.
The Royal Commission showed that there had been a remarkable consistency over the years, there being a slight tendency to greater leniency over the period 1900 to 1949 the practice otherwise having been fairly consistent. The Home Secretary has his expert advisers and yesterday the right hon. Member for South Shields paid tribute to the meticulous care that they take and the very scrupulous care to be fair and merciful in the recommendation.
I call to mind part of a speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) about this matter, which was quoted in the debates in another place but which appears in the OFFICIAL REPORT of the House of Commons for 15th July, 1948. My right hon. Friend then said:
One of the great privileges and advantages we have in our present system of procedure is that the Home Secretary is unfettered as to the advice which should be tendered in the use of the Royal Prerogative. At every point in our system of criminal justice the benefit of the doubt is given to the accused. At every point in the subsequent consideration of a capital sentence, when it has been passed, the same bias is shown in favour of the convicted person. But when justice and the law have done their best within their limits, when precedents have been searched and weighed, mercy still roams around the prison seeking for some chink by which she can creep in."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 15th July, 1948; Vol. 453, c. 1439.]
My right hon. Friend the Member for Woodford was, of course, himself at one time Home Secretary.
It is quite obvious that the same spirit is still general today in that there is this meticulous search by the Home Secretary himself in weighing whether to advise the exercise of the Prerogative of mercy, the very element which it is proposed to give to the jury under the new Clause in deciding whether there may be some extenuating circumstances which would justify the respite of the capital sentence.
It is really a matter which experience has shown that the Home Secretary can carry out properly maintaining standards, and to the public's satisfaction. As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East said, it is impossible to construe a way for the jury to determine what are extenuating circumstances, and there are bound to be some extenuating circumstances. As the right hon. Member for South Shields said, to put this burden on the jury after its members have been through the strain of a long and wearing case, making heavy demands on their mental and moral powers, is something which we should not contemplate, which is quite alien to our present and approved code of penal procedure, and which has the very grave disadvantages that the right hon. Gentleman pointed out.
Finally, as I pointed out, the balance of argument, even on the Royal Commission's own showing, was obviously very narrow. The arguments for adopting jury discretion are far less strong after this Bill than they were before. This Bill greatly reduces the number of cases in which persons will be sentenced to death, and particularly in the sphere where the jury discretion would be most likely to operate properly, namely, in the sphere of mental responsibility for crime. There will certainly be anomalies if the decision is left to the jury and the Royal Prerogative has to remain in reserve.
Therefore, for the reasons put forward by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East and by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields, I must say that the Government cannot accept this proposed Clause.

Mr. S. Silverman: The fact that the decision of the Royal Commission was reached on a narrow balance of argument I do not find particularly impressive. It is rather like the narrow balance of argument to which Mr. Micawber reduced the difference between happiness and misery; provided the balance swings down on one side, the exact weight of the deciding factor hardly seemed relevant, let alone important.
I think I made it clear in the speech in which I moved this Motion that the disadvantages of this proposal were perfectly plain to me, as indeed they were to the Royal Commission. It was not perhaps really necessary that they should be

pointed out again and again, because the question is not whether there are disadvantages or not—we all know that there are—but whether it is better to bear those disadvantages than to have the disadvantages of the death penalty itself and the exemptions from it determined as they always were.
I must confess, too, that I was greatly surprised to hear the Joint Under-Secretary of State quote from the evidence of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill), who was Home Secretary a very long time ago. I would not say a single word that might cause anxiety or further self-examination in so dreadful a matter to any right hon. Gentleman on either side of the Committee who has ever had, or might ever have again, this job to face. I am bound to say, however, that after the painstaking and detailed analysis of reprieves over the past ten years made in a pamphlet published by the Observer, in which there were collected into one list cases in which reprieves were granted and into another list cases in which they were refused, I would defy any rational person to detect any principle on which one list could be separated or distinguished from the other.
If I hear the hon. and learned Gentleman say that no one is ever executed in whose case there is discoverable the faintest ground on which a reprieve might be justified, he leaves me almost speechless with astonishment. Was it so impossible to find a ground in Bentley's case or Mrs. Christofi's case or Ruth Ellis's case? If we were really looking for a ground on which to save those lives, was it really impossible to find one? Let us stop talking nonsense about this and stop being complacent about it. The point is that there is no such principle, and the pretence that there is one is merely pretence and nothing else.
I do not want to divide the Committee on this issue. If the Royal Commission had been free to make a recommendation about the death penalty itself, I do not believe that it would ever have made such a recommendation. From its point of view, it was nothing but a very bad second-best.

Mr. Ede: Before my hon. Friend goes any further, I hope he will understand that I do not abate at all my belief that abolition is the proper thing and that,


of the two alternatives posed by the Royal Commission, that is the one which the Government ought to have taken.

Mr. Silverman: I have fully understood that. If I did not expressly say so, it was because I am certain that everyone who has heard my right hon. Friend on this subject clearly understands that that is the position. As I say, the Royal Commission itself was making this proposal only as a very bad second best. I know that my right hon. Friend agrees with me—he has just confirmed it—that if the Government reject it as he rejects it, they ought to reject it for the reasons and on the basis that my right hon. Friend rejects it—because it is much better to get rid of this obscene futility once and for all.
Having said that, and in view of the division of opinion and of the fact that, whatever the Government may say, this penalty has already to all practical intents and purposes been abolished, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion and Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause.—(MEDICAL EXAMINATION OF PERSON CHARGED WITH MURDER.)

The mental state of every person charged with murder shall be examined by two doctors of whom one shall be a qualified psychiatrist who is not a member of the prison medical service and copies of their reports shall be supplied to the defence fourteen days before the trial.—[Mr. Anthony Greenwood.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
Many hon. Members will recall that Recommendation (28) of the Royal Commission reads as follows:
In England and Wales the mental state of every prisoner charged with murder should be examined by two doctors, of whom one at least should be a psychiatrist of standing who is not a member of the prison medical service and the other usually an experienced member of that service.
The present practice, as I understand, is as follows. In England and Wales the prosecution in a murder case relies on the prison medical officer for its information about the prisoner's state of mind. In Scotland, however, only one prison—at any rate that was so at the time of the Royal Commission—has a full-time

medical officer, and it is, therefore, the practice for the prosecution to arrange for two psychiatrists to see every prisoner accused of murder.
The obvious advantage of the English system is that it provides for continuous professional observation of a man or woman charged with murder. However, the English system also has three disadvantages. First, the prisoner may be in a prison where there is only a part-time medical officer. Secondly, even full-time medical officers may have no psychiatric training or experience. Thirdly, it is, I think, most desirable that any evidence about a prisoner's state of mind which is presented by the Crown should obviously bear the stamp of independence of judgment, and, although one would not for a moment suggest that prison medical officers are biased in the reports which they give, nevertheless they are officers of the Crown and to that extent their judgment may sometimes be questioned by the prisoner and by those who sympathise with him. The Scottish practice avoids this disadvantage, but it fails to secure the advantage of continuity of skilled observation.
I should like to read to the Committee the compromise at which the Royal Commission arrived upon this point. The Report states, in paragraph 422:
We have considered whether it would be possible to introduce a system in England which would combine the advantages of the English and the Scottish procedures. We believe that this could best be done by arranging that every prisoner charged with murder in England or Wales should be specially examined as to his state of mind by two doctors, of whom one at least should be a psychiatrist of standing who is not a member of the prison medical service, and the other usually an experienced member of that service.
It is the results of the Royal Commission's deliberations as contained in that paragraph which we have sought to embody in the new Clause.
8.45 p.m.
In this Clause we have two main objects in view. First, we want to establish that it is the duty of the State to obtain the best advice which is available about the mental condition of a prisoner as a guide to the Crown's conduct of the case against him, and, secondly, we want to ensure that the evidence on this point presented by the Crown shall be the best obtainable and of undoubted impartiality.


We attach a great deal of importance to both these points. Although our deliberations are now coming to a close, we hope that even at this very late stage, if only as a gesture to the work the Opposition have put in, the Under-Secretary will feel disposed to support us and see that this new Clause is added to the Bill.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: I should like briefly to say how impressed I was with the observations of my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale (Mr. Anthony Greenwood), expressed with moderation and impressive skill, about the difficult problems of the administration of justice in the courts.
I hope that the Under-Secretary will say that the kind of arrangement which the new Clause proposes is being applied already. I know that to a certain extent it is. If I may, without undue advertisement, venture to refer to the last murder trial in which I appeared, that was the very arrangement which the Crown carried out, namely, a report by both a member of the prison medical service and by an independent consultant psychiatrist.
It seemed to me to be a most admirable arrangement and I trust that we will get that kind of answer at the very least from the Under-Secretary. I hope that at long last there will be a concession to the sweet reasonableness which on this, as on so many other matters, the Opposition have shown in the course of the debate.

Mr. Weitzman: I want to refer once again to a case, mentioned on a number of occasions, which is relevant to this new Clause, the Christofi case. There, the prison doctor, who was certainly an able doctor from the point of view of qualifications, but one doctor and one alone, gave his opinion that Mrs. Christofi was insane. We know that subsequently, after she had been found guilty, three doctors appointed by the Home Secretary examined her and found her sane. Had this new Clause been in operation, the position would have been that at a very early stage she would have been examined by two people, one of whom would have been a qualified psychiatrist not a member of the prison medical service, and another doctor.
The evidence about medical findings would be open to the prosecution and supplied to the defence and the position about such a woman's condition would

be perfectly clear. Clause 2 (2) puts upon the defence the onus of showing diminished responsibility. It is, therefore, essential that something should be done to provide the evidence in that way. There is no reason whatever why this new Clause should not be adopted.

Mr. Simon: If I say that the Government cannot accept this Amendment, it is not because—to echo the words of the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Anthony Greenwood)—I do not feel that the Opposition has been helpful in the detailed examination and scrutiny of the Bill, and particularly it is not because—to echo the words of the hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones)—that I think that the attitude of the Opposition has been other than sweetly reasonable. It is because, in the first place, there are drafting points about this new Clause which render it unacceptable. Secondly, and far more importantly, as the hon. and learned Gentleman himself suggested, the Home Office have now adopted the practice set out in this new Clause and the Government feel that it is the sort of matter which is eminently suitable for administrative arrangement and unsuitable for interpolation in a statutory enactment.
The hon. Member for Rossendale set out the background of this proposal and referred to the evidence that was given before the Royal Commission as to the Scottish and English procedure, and that, I think, renders it unnecessary for me to recapitulate those matters.
When the Royal Commission reported, the Home Office did take steps to implement administratively its proposal in this connection, and for the last two years it has been implemented so far as practicable.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: Mr. Elwyn Jones indicated assent.

Mr. Simon: I see that the hon. and learned Gentleman nods his head, and I am sure that in his experience he has come across more than one case where this practice has obtained. I say "so far as practicable" because, in these matters, one does rely to some extent on the good nature of outside psychiatrists, and I should like to take this opportunity of paying tribute to the services they have rendered in this flatter. It is often at very great inconvenience, because the


observation, to be of value, cannot be an isolated observation and there must be, at any rate, repeated visits to the prisoner to form any worthwhile opinion on his mental state, other than in a very obvious case of psychosis. What one would desire, as the hon. Member for Rossendale pointed out, is really continuous observation, and, of course, that is the value of having one of the medical officers a member of the prison medical service, most of whom have had psychiatric training or experience.
Since the practice was introduced, out of 200 prisoners in round numbers, 130 have been examined by outside psychiatrists—that is, I think I am right in saying, in practically every case where there has been a question of mental instability. Copies of the prison officer's medical report and of the report of the outside psychiatrist, where one has been appointed, are sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions and he sends them on to the defence. The prison medical officers are instructed to submit their reports as early as possible, and in any event not later than fourteen days before the trial, if this can be achieved.
That really meets the point as to the fourteen days which is in the new Clause, but, of course, sometimes that cannot be done and it would be unreasonable to say automatically there should be a failure to observe the statute and an application for an adjournment of the trial if, for example, the reports could not be rendered to the defence fourteen days before the trial and arrived only seven days before. If the defence were in any way hampered in its conduct of the case by the late arrival, that, on its merits, would be a ground for postponement; but it would introduce a quite unnecessary rigidity to have the present administrative practice reduced in such terms to a statutory enactment. The difficulty in the case of the outside psychiatrist is far greater, because he is by definition not subject to the control of the Prison Commissioners and, therefore, clearly cannot be rigidly tied as to time.
I spoke of some drafting difficulties. I do not want to over-labour this sort of point, but the term "qualified psychiatrist" is unsatisfactory. I do not know what qualifications are required. The Royal Commission's expression was "a

psychiatrist of standing", and that would cover the kind of medical practitioner or consultant whom one would desire to appoint, and the type of man who is in fact appointed. He may or may not have a psychiatric degree or a diploma in psychiatric medicine but, nevertheless, he may be a consultant and a great expert in this branch. As I have said, the requirement that the report should be supplied to the defence fourteen days before the trial could not always be complied with, and it would be unreasonable to insist upon it and therefore have to adjourn the trial.
I do not think I need refer to some of the other smaller matters which have been raised. I wanted to assure the Committee that the Home Office has adopted the practice recommended by the Commission I certainly do not read its recommendation as meaning that it wished to see the recommendation reduced to a statutory enactment, and I can give an undertaking that the practice which has been instituted in pursuance of Recommendation 28 since the Report will be continued in the spirit desired by the hon. Member and hon. and learned Member who have spoken.

Mr. Ede: Can the hon. and learned Gentleman tell me what happens if the defence intimates that it does not want the prisoner examined mentally? I had a case where a certain person had been found guilty of murder and, within ten minutes of the sentence having been passed, the distinguished King's Counsel who had been briefed for the defence was in my room at the Home Office to inform me that I could not hang this man because he was mad. When I said, "Why did not you plead that at the trial?" he said, "I thought I was going to get him off." He was therefore very anxious to keep any thought of "guilty but insane" out of everybody's mind. If this is understood generally to be the case and it leaks out that somehow or other a prisoner has not been medically examined, it might give rise to certain thoughts in some people's minds. I do not know what will happen now that what the hon. and learned Member says has become the practice.
I heard the earlier part of his speech with a profound feeling of disappointment. I do not think anybody could have been more reasonable than my hon.


Friend in the way he put the proposal forward. The Minister paid a great tribute to him, and then gave him no reward. I know that virtue always has to be its own reward, but if there are difficulties of drafting—which has been said on more than one occasion—it is always open to the Government to say to an hon. Member, "This is a very good Amendment, but there are difficulties of drafting. We have a form of words which covers the point, and if you would sooner move it in that form than the form in which you have put the Amendment down we shall be very happy to accept it." Or the Government spokesman might say, "We will put down this form of words, and if you will withdraw your Amendment, we will move it." I wonder why that was not done regarding several points in this Bill. I am sure now that there was no desire to avoid a Report stage, because we have been so happy and pleasant together for the greater part of today. I should have thought the hon. and learned Gentleman would have been anxious to continue so pleasant an association. I hope that when we discuss the Amendments to the Schedule he may yet think a suitable reward might be given to my hon. Friend.

9.0 p.m.

Mr. Simon: The right hon. Gentleman has made two points. He asks whether a suitable form of words could be devised. I do not doubt that it could, but I am sure he will agree that this is preeminently a matter for administration, rather than statutory enactments. For that reason, rather than because of draft-

ing errors, we cannot accept the Amendment.

I hesitate to give an answer to his second point in view of the right hon. Gentleman's experience and my inexperience. However, I think I am right in saying, whether under prison rules or standing orders, that every prisoner admitted to prison by routine must be medically examined. This would mean that there would be an initial examination of his state of mind. In the case of a prisoner charged with murder, it is very much more thorough, and he is kept under continuous observation with a view to having an exhaustive inquiry into his mental state. I do not think that that can in any way operate to his detriment.

Medical evidence is made available to the defence who can use it if they wish. It is not the practice of the prosecution to advance evidence of that sort. Indeed, I think I am right in saying that there are no means by which the prosecution could seek a verdict, say, of guilty but insane, or of diminished responsibility. That is a matter for the defence. Therefore I think that the right hon. Gentleman may rest assured that there is a routine medical examination; that in the case of persons charged with murder it is the best available, in the sense that there is continuous observation and now there may be outside examination. That operates purely for the benefit of the accused man.

Question put, That the Clause be read a Second time:—

The Committee divided: Ayes 160, Noes 194.

Division No. 49.]
AYES
[9.3 p.m.


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Hale, Leslie


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Corbet, Mrs. Freda
Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)


Awbery, S. S.
Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Hayman, F. H.


Bacon, Miss Alice
Crossman, R. H. S.
Herbison, Miss M.


Balfour, A.
Cullen, Mrs. A.
Hobson, C. R.


Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
Holman, P.


Bevan, Rt. Hon. A. (Ebbw Vale)
Deer, G
Holmes, Horace


Blackburn, F,
de Freitas, Geoffrey
Houghton, Douglas


Blyton, W. R.
Delargy, H. J.
Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)


Boardman, H.
Dye, S.
Howell, Denis (All Saints)


Bottomley, Rt. Hon. A. G.
Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Hoy, J. H.


Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S.W.)
Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)
Hubbard, T. F.


Bowles, F. G.
Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
Fernyhough, E.
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)


Brockway, A. F.
Fienburgh, W.
Hunter, A. E.


Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)
Forman, J. C.
Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)
Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)


Burke, W. A.
Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)


Burton, Miss F. E.
Gibson, C. W.
Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.


Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Greenwood, Anthony
Janner, B.


Callaghan, L. J.
Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.
Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.


Castle, Mrs. B. A.
Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)
Jeger, Mrs. Lena (Holbn &amp;St.Pnes.S.)


Champion, A. J.
Griffiths, William (Exchange)
Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)


Coldrick, W.
Grimond, J.
Johnson, James (Rugby)




Jones, Rt. Hon. A. Creech (Wakefield)
Neal, Harold (Bolsover)
Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank


Jones, David (The Hartlepools)
Orbach, M.
Sparks, J. A.


Jones, Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)
Oswald, T.
Steele, T.


Jones, Jack (Rotherham)
Padley, W. E.
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)


Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Paling, Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)
Stones, W. (Consett)


Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Palmer, A. M. F.
Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.


Kenyon, C.
Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Sylvester, G. O.


Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.
Pargiter, G. A.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)


King, Dr. H. M.
Parker, J.
Thomas, George (Cardiff)


Lawson, G. M.
Parkin, B. T.
Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)


Ledger, R. J.
Peart, T. F.
Thornton, E.


Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Pentland, N.
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn


Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)
Plummer, Sir Leslie
Usborne, H. C.


Lewis, Arthur
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)
Wade, D. W.


Lindgren, G. S.
Probert, A. R.
Warbey, W. N.


Lipton, Marcus
Proctor, W. T.
Weitzman, D.


Mabon, Dr. J. Dickson
Randall, H. E.
West, D. G.


MacColl, J. E.
Redhead, E. C.
Wheeldon, W. E.


McGovern, J.
Reeves, J.
Willey, Frederick


McInnes, J.
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)
Williams, Rev. Llywelyn (Ab'tillery)


McKay, John (Wallsend)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Williams, Ronald (Wigan)


MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)


Mahon, Simon
Rosa, William
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.
Royle, C.
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Mason, Roy
Short, E. W.
Woodburn, Rt. Hon. A.


Mitchison, G. R.
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)
Woof, R. E.


Moody, A. s.
Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)
Younger, Rt. Hon. K.


Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)
Skeffington, A. M.
Zilliacus, K.


Mort, D. L.
Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)



Moyle, A.
Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:




Mr. Pearson and Mr. Wilkins.




NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.
Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.


Aitken, W. T.
Duthie, W. S.
Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)
Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)


Alport, C. J. M.
Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn
Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)


Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)
Errington, Sir Eric
Longden, Gilbert


Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)
Farey-Jones, F. W.
Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)


Armstrong, C. W.
Fell, A.
Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chiswick)


Ashton, H.
Finlay, Graeme
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh


Atkins, H. E.
Fisher, Nigel
Macdonald, Sir Peter


Baldwin, A. E.
Fletcher-Cooke, C.
McKibbin, A. J.


Barber, Anthony
Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe &amp; Lonsdale)
Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)


Barlow, Sir John
Garner-Evans, E. H.
McLaughlin, Mrs. P.


Barter, John
Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan
Maclean, Fitzroy (Lancaster)


Bell, Philip (Bolton, E.)
Gower, H. R.
McLean, Neil (Inverness)


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Graham, Sir Fergus
Macleod, Rt. Hn. Iain (Enfield, W.)


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Grant, W. (Woodside)
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)


Bidgood, J. C.
Grant-Ferris, Wg. Cdr. R.(Nantwich)
Maddan, Martin


Biggs-Davison, J. A.
Green, A.
Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Grosvenor, Lt.-Col. R. G.
Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.


Bishop, F. P.
Gurden, Harold
Marlowe, A A. H.


Body, R. F.
Harris, Reader (Heston)
Marples, Rt. Hon. A. E.


Bossom, Sir Alfred
Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)
Marshall, Douglas


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Mathew, R.


Boyle, Sir Edward
Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Macclesfd)
Maude, Angus


Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)
Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel
Mawby, R. L.


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.
Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.


Brooman-White, R. C.
Hesketh, R. F.
Morrison, John (Salisbury)


Bryan, P.
Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)
Nabarro, G. D. N.


Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.
Hill, John (S. Norfolk)
Nairn, D. L. S.


Burden, F. F. A.
Hinchingbrooke, Viscount
Nicholls, Harmar


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Holland-Martin, C. J.
Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)


Butler, Rt. Hn. R. A. (Saffron Walden)
Hope, Lord John
Nicolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)


Carr, Robert
Hornby, R. P.
Nugent, G. R. H.


Chichester-Clark, R.
Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)
Oakshott, H. D.


Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D.


Cole, Norman
Hurd, A. R.
Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)


Conant, Maj. Sir Roger
Hylton-Foster, Rt. Hon. Sir Harry
Osborne, C.


Cooper-Key, E. M.
Iremonger, T. L.
Page, R. G.


Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.




Corfield, Capt. F. V.
Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)


Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)
Pickthorn, K. W. M.


Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.
Jennings, J. C. (Burton)
Pilkington, Capt. R. A.


Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)
Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Pott, H. P.


Crowder, Petre (Ruislip-North wood)
Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
Powell, J. Enoch


Cunningham, Knox
Joseph, Sir Keith
Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)


Currie, G. B. H.
Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lancelot
Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.


Dance, J. C. G.
Kaberry, D.
Raikes, Sir Victor


D'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry
Keegan, D.
Rawlinson, Peter


Deedes, W. F.
Kerr, H. W.
Redmayne, M.


Donaldson, Cmdr. C. E. McA.
Kimball, M.
Remnant, Hon. P.


Doughty, C. J. A.
Lagden, G. W.
Rippon, A. G. F.


du Cann, E. D. L.
Leburn, W. G.
Robinson, Sir Roland (Blackpool, S.)







Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)
Summers, Sir Spencer
wall, Major Patrick


Roper, Sir Harold
Sumner, W. D. M. (Orpington)
Ward, Rt. Hon. G. R. (Worcester)


Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard
Temple, J. M.
Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)


Russell, R. S.
Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)
Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.


Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.
Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)
Whitelaw, W. S. I. (Penrith &amp; Border)


Shepherd, William
Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R. (Croydon, S.)
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Simon, J. E. S.(Middlesbrough, W.)
Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.
Wills, G. (Bridgwater)


Smithers, Peter (Winchester)
Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Soames, Capt. C.
Tilney, John (Wavertree)
Wood, Hon. R.


Spearman, Sir Alexander
Turner, H. F. L.
Woollam, John Victor


Stevens, Geoffrey
Vane, W. M. F.



Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)
Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.
Vickers, Miss J. H.
Mr. Wakefield and


Storey, S.
Vosper, Rt. Hon. D. F.
Mr. Hughes-Young.


Studholme, Sir Henry
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)

First Schedule.—(SUPPLEMENTARY PROVISIONS AS TO PROCEDURE, APPEALS, ETC.)

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I beg to move, in page 8, line 20, to leave out "three" and to insert "twenty-one".
This Amendment relates to the provision in the First Schedule which says that
Where a person is convicted of murder, he shall not
be sentenced to death because
of section six of this Act
on the ground that he has already been found guilty of a murder committed in Great Britain on a different occasion unless
notice is given to him and to the clerk of assize that it is intended to prove the previous conviction
three days before the trial.
It seems to us that three days is much too short notice to give to the prisoner and to his legal advisers, and we therefore suggest, instead, that there should be three weeks' notice so that the necessary steps might be taken. We should very much like to hear from the Attorney-General why the Government felt that three days was adequate notice. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman could give us some reassurance on the point we should be most grateful to him.

The Attorney-General: I am very glad that the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Anthony Greenwood) has invited me to explain why we put in, at first sight, a low limit of three days' notice. The Amendment suggests that there should be at least 21 days' notice. I think I shall be able to convince the hon. Gentleman that, in certain circumstances, 21 days' notice might prove extremely inconvenient without having any corresponding advantages.
Clause 6 will apply to two categories of cases. There will be, perhaps, the Smith, Christie and Heath type of cases where, in the course of one assize or one session of the Central Criminal Court, more than one charge of murder will be preferred against the same individual. There, of course, there will be the evidence in the magistrate's court of more than one murder having been committed, and from the time that the case first starts in the magistrate's court—for instance, in the case of Christie—it will be known to the accused long before the trial at the Old Bailey that he certainly may be, and almost certainly will be, charged with two murders. In that type of case, a provision for notice of any kind seems somewhat unnecessary because the accused will know right from the start. He will know certainly from the moment that he obtains, as he can do, a draft of the bill of indictment under the new practice rules which have recently been made, or a copy of the indictment. In that type of case, therefore, the requirement of notice does not really exist. That is why one has the proviso to the end of paragraph 2.
9.15 p.m.
The other category of case to which Clause 6 applies will be the category where a man has been sentenced to life imprisonment for one murder and then, after his release, commits another murder for which he is indicted. Of course, it will be well known to him that he has previously been convicted of murder in cases of that category, and he may suspect and, indeed, apprehend that, on his second trial, he will be charged with having committed the first murder.
I quite agree that there is a need for notice, but it seems extremely unlikely that in that type of case his legal advisers


would be unaware of his previous conviction of murder. It is highly improbable. In my experience, prosecutions are never reluctant to inform the defence, on inquiry, of the accused's previous convictions known to them, which the accused may or may not dispute.
It may be asked why we have chosen the low limit of three days. The reason, shortly, is this. We believe that normally—indeed, almost certainly—the accused will know long before three days before his trial commences that he is charged with having committed a previous offence of murder. But if we put in a period of 21 days, it might lead to difficulties in this way. Suppose we had, for instance, an assize at Northampton, with a man charged with two murders; one case is tried at that assize, and the other case, because of lack of time or for other reasons, is adjourned or transferred to the assize at Leicester, the next assize town, which takes place immediately afterwards. If that happened, the proviso to this paragraph would not apply. Then, if we had to give 21 days' notice, we would not be able to try at Leicester Assizes.

Mr. S. Silverman: Why need we?

The Attorney-General: The hon. Gentleman may say, "Why need we?" but I am not in favour of the idea that where there are two charges of murder, neither of them having been tried, there should be any long interval between the first trial and the second trial. I think that would be very difficult and probably rather intolerable. Trials in those circumstances should follow as speedily as possible one after the other. That is the reason why 21 days as a limit might prove extremely awkward in particular cases.
Let me, however, add this. Suppose the defence were to find that they were in any way embarrassed by the shortness of notice in a particular case—if, for instance they had notice only four days before the trial and the accused said, "I dispute that I was the person convicted of this other murder; I was not there. They have got the wrong person;

it was not me." Of course, that is very unlikely in that second category type of case, but let us suppose that he did wish to dispute that. The dispute would probably be only on identity or whether it was a different occasion, which would not be so difficult to resolve if the two occasions were years apart and the man had been serving a life sentence in between. If the defence said they were not ready to deal with it, and were taken by surprise by the charge, I do not believe that there is any judge who would not grant an adjournment at the request of the defence, nor do I suppose for one moment that the prosecution would not be absolutely willing to accede to the request.
In fact, one might say that the provision for three days is really unnecessary because, in practice, the defence, where there is any possibility of a charge of this sort, would be informed of the possibility a long time beforehand. However, I think it is desirable to have a minimum period, and, for the reasons I have given, I believe this to be the right minimum period; but if, in a particular instance, it was too short, there would be no difficulty in the defence getting a longer time in which to consider it.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I have listened with great sympathy and interest to what the right hon. and learned Attorney-General has told us. The most convincing part of the case he advanced was his reference to the possibility of the defence getting a postponement of the trial on the ground he mentioned. However, in view of the assurance that he has given us upon this point, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Schedule agreed to.

Second Schedule agreed to.

Bill reported, without Amendment; to be read the Third time Tomorrow.

Orders of the Day — ADJOURNMENT

Resolved, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. E. Wakefield.]

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-three minutes past Nine o'clock.